Help your students' story telling abilities grow with this lesson that helps them recount what happened in a story and has them point out key details.

Teach your students about picture walks as a strategy to understand the author's purpose in a fictional text. This lesson can be used as a stand-alone lesson or as support for the Examining Author's Purpose in a Fictional Text lesson.

Graphic novels, animated stories, and storytelling videos pop with enhanced meaning, tone and beauty. Use this lesson plan with a mentor text to teach your students to note how such features contribute to the reader’s experience.

Introduce your students to some of the major structural elements of poetry in this comprehensive lesson.

Got facts? Got opinions? Use this lesson plan to teach your students to evaluate texts for facts and opinions. Students will use a non-fiction text selection to collect quotes as proof.

Use this lesson to help your ELs summarize information from a text and use context clues to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words. This lesson can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support to the Day 4 section of the Star Unit lesson.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a 17th century writer and philosopher who today is considered one of the first documented feminists and advocates for women’s education. In this lesson, students will read two nonfiction texts about Sor Juana and discuss her life and accomplishments before writing an opinion piece about her.

Your little poets will love how their creative writing abilities will grow with this lesson about similes and metaphors. Students engage in fun activities to learn about similes and metaphors and write comparisons as directed.

Help students understand ethics and how it relates to life in the classroom with this lesson that has them use their own independent reading books to find relevant situations.

Kids will love learning some fun facts about elephants while developing their reading comprehension skills. Using T-charts and Venn diagrams, they'll analyze stories and explore different characteristics of fiction and nonfiction.

This lesson gives students practice identifying first person and third person narration in fiction and nonfiction texts. It could be taught as a stand-alone lesson or as a precursor to the lesson Fiction vs. Nonfiction.

Charts, graphs, and diagrams are complex text features for students to decipher. Use this lesson to familiarize students with these features. It can be taught on its own or before the lesson Charts and Graphs and Diagrams, Oh My!

Students will learn about the holiday El Día de los Muertos through engaging activities and connecting to their own traditions.

Students will analyze census data from Sojourner Truth and Walt Disney using past tense verbs and sentence frames. It can be used on its own or as support to the lesson Researching the Past Using Primary Sources.

Help your students absorb the details of a text and make inferences about what they read with the strategy of close reading. By reading closely, students will become better able to understand complex themes and nuances in a text.

Describe what's happening in the script! Use this lesson to help your ELs describe events in a drama. It can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support to the lesson Summer Drama.

Who doesn't love peanut butter and jelly? This lesson has the potential to get a little messy as you reinforce the letter S!

Anansi invites his friend Turtle to dinner at his house ... but does he treat him like a friend? In this reading comprehension lesson, your class practices questioning, retelling, and identifying the moral in "Anansi and the Turtle."

Use this lesson with your students to teach them to describe the differences between stories with contrasting conjunctions. This lesson can stand-alone or be used as a pre-lesson for the Finding Similarities and Differences lesson.

Use this lesson to help your ELs learn character traits and find them in a text. It can be a stand-alone lesson or a support lesson to the Identifying Character Traits lesson.

All fictional stories have story elements but they sure can differ between stories. In this lesson, students will compare and contrast the story elements of two fictional stories and document their findings in a graphic organizer.

Understanding the big idea of a nonfiction text and being able to write a succinct summary are key fourth grade skills. This lesson focuses on summarizing a nonfiction passage in three to four sentences.