Students explore the distinction between the fiction story Bear Snores On and the nonfiction book Every Autumn Comes the Bear.
Shhh! Bear's Sleeping: Learning About Nonfiction and Fiction Using Read-Alouds
Digging Deeper: Developing Comprehension Using Thank You, Mr. Falker
A read-aloud of Patricia Polacco's Thank You, Mr. Falker helps promote deeper comprehension through questioning to achieve personal connections and discussions of character and theme.
Integrating Language Arts: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
This lesson integrates reading, writing, listening, and speaking to boost students' comprehension skills. Students explore Laura Joffe Numeroff 's If You Give a Mouse a Cookie using a variety of techniques, beginning with a picture walk and ending with the creation and publication of their own versions of the text.
Teaching Shapes Using Read-Alouds, Visualization, and Sketch to Stretch
Visual clues in winter-themed books used in this lesson encourage students to make real-world math connections.
Combining Read-Alouds With Economics in the Primary Grades
Students learn that what you read in books can really add up when they analyze literary texts for economic concepts.
Family Ties: Making Connections to Improve Reading Comprehension
Families are all about connections between people. In this lesson, students read three books about different families and make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections to those texts.
Let's Read It Again: Comprehension Strategies for English-Language Learners
Help Spanish-speaking English-language learners unlock the mysteries of their new language by using a bilingual book to recognize unfamiliar words and construct meaning from the text.
Read a Song: Using Song Lyrics for Reading and Writing
This lesson will be music to the students' ears when they hear that they get to read song lyrics and compose original lyrics for a familiar song.
Whose Shoes? Using Artifacts to Teach Reading and Rhyming Patterns
If the shoe fits… Actually, any shoe will fit this lesson, and the Artifact Analysis Questions provided will help students see it in a whole new way. Several rhyming texts take the shoe theme a step further, and introduce activities to increase students' awareness of rhyming words.
Safety Tips With Officer Buckle and Gloria
Safety first! In this lesson, students take the lessons taught by Officer Buckle and Gloria to heart as they explore safety in everyday situations.
Casting Shadows Across Literacy and Science
Shadows, shadows, everywhere! In this lesson, students read fiction, informational text, and poetry about shadows to extend their knowledge of the concept before casting their own shadow poetry.
Reading and Writing About Whales Using Fiction and Nonfiction Texts
Students will have a whale of a good time in this lesson in which they use fiction and nonfiction texts to write a letter to an online scientist.
Learning Centers: From Shared to Independent Practice
Seven blind mice—see how they spend each day of the week in this lesson that uses the book Seven Blind Mice to guide students through shared reading, writing, and listening activities.
Cowboys and Castles: Interacting With Fractured Texas Tales
What do cowboy hats have to do with fairy tales? Two traditional fairy tales and their Texas-based counterparts set the stage for five different ways to respond to text.
Poetry Portfolios: Using Poetry to Teach Reading
Teach your students about sentence structure, rhyming words, sight words, vocabulary, and print concepts using a weekly poem.
Gingerbread Phonics
"Run, run, as fast as you can." Students use this refrain from The Gingerbread Man to learn letter-sound correspondence. Students use their new skills to write an online story.
A Schema-Building Study With Patricia Polacco
Students use the Semantic Impressions and Possible Sentences strategies to write about Patricia Polacco's books Chicken Sunday and Rechenka's Egg, complete a character study, and write using a WebQuest.
Two Thumbs Up! Get Students Writing and Publishing Book Reviews
Students evaluate book reviews written by other children, discussing their components and effectiveness, and write reviews of favorite books to record on video or post online.
Bingo! Using Environmental Print to Practice Reading
The game Bingo is transformed in this lesson in which students use symbols and images to make connections to environmental print through the use of personalized Bingo cards.
Reading Informational Texts Using the 3-2-1 Strategy
Students can count on using the 3-2-1 strategy to help them successfully comprehend and write about an informational text.