The hardest part of writing an essay can be the first few steps. This lesson and accompanying graphic organizers will help students map out their ideas and practice crafting paragraphs. With this support, your writers will be off and running!

Your students may be familiar with common texting language, but do they know the meaning of common abbreviations? With this lesson your students will explore a variety of abbreviations and their corresponding meanings!

Everyone loves an intriguing introduction! Help your second graders hook their readers as they practice writing new and improved introductions to well-loved fictional stories in this fun writing lesson.

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.

When reading, we all encounter unknown words at times. But how do we figure them out? In this lesson, students learn how to become a “human dictionary” by using a variety of strategies to figure out the meaning of unknown words.

This fun art-inspired lesson will give your students a chance to dive into a study of the five senses.

Spelling is sensational with common suffixes! With this lesson, your students will learn how to navigate various suffixes and use them as they create and spell new words.

In this lesson, ask students to compare and contrast two important African-American historical figures. Students will write an informational paragraph on the similarities and differences between W.E.B. Du Bois and George Washington Carver.

Young writers will learn to manipulate and combine sentences with conjunctions and adverb phrases. This skill helps students understand that crafting sentences is a creative and artistic process.

Help your second graders hone their research skills using this animal-themed lesson! Students will enjoy choosing an animal, identifying questions, and researching their answers as they learn about writing informative essays.

Your students may know about Rosa Parks, but do they know about the Montgomery Bus Boycott that her famous action inspired? Enhance students' knowledge of this important part of the Civil Rights movement while teaching cause and effect.

Let's practice reading nonfiction texts! In this lesson, teach your ELs about identifying and describing text features. This lesson can be taught on its own or used as support for the lesson Formatting Text Features.

Ask an important question this month: What does an activist do? This engaging lesson can be used leading up to Martin Luther King Jr. Day (and year-round). It supports students in understanding what it means to be an activist and how Martin Luther King Jr. used collaborative action to change the world and speak out against oppression. Perfect for first graders and second graders, this activity explores word meaning and other reading and writing skills.

Teach your students to read time to the nearest five minutes by counting by fives! Use this lesson as a stand-alone support lesson for ELs or alongside Tricky Time Telling.

Use this lesson to reinforce using sentence level context clues to decode challenging words in a nonfiction text. This can be used as a stand alone activity or a support the Using Context Clues to Understand Word Meanings lesson.

Is it real or is it fantasy? This lesson introduces students to the literary concepts of realism and fantasy. Readers will practice this skill by using details in texts to distinguish the two genre elements.

Mix-ups of "there," "they're," and "their" happen way too often. There is no better time than now to help your students get their homophones down. They're sure to have fun with this interactive English lesson!

What do the letters A, E, I, O, and U have in common? They're all featured in this engaging reading lesson. Give your young learners a chance to play a version of Red Light, Green Light that doubles as a vowel review.

Sugar skulls and fancy dress aren't all there is to the Day of the Dead. In this lesson students will learn about several societies that celebrate their dead, as well as some of the history behind the traditions of the Día de los Muertos.

In this lesson, students will practice defining words by making their own vocabulary cards. This lesson plan can be used alone or with the Mini Dictionaries lesson plan.

Give your class the "write" stuff! In this lesson, your students will learn to master combining sentences using sentences with the same subjects or predicates.

Earth Day is a worldwide celebration that promotes awareness and appreciation for the environment. Use this lesson to teach your students about Earth Day with an engaging poetry activity.

Get your magnifying glasses—it’s time to play text detective. In this lesson, students will learn the importance of reading comprehension and making inferences while learning to correctly label the 5 Ws within a text.

Get your students excited about geography with a lesson on Earth's oceans. After reading two different texts, they'll be ready to dive right into ocean paragraph writing.

Teach your students to ask and differentiate between recall questions and inferential questions. This lesson will help build a classroom culture around asking deep, inferential questions.

We write sentences to tell thoughts, but what happens when we add some parameters? In this lesson, students dissect the words they find in sentences then follow directions to create their own wacky sentences.

Expose your students to the wonderful genre of drama, but be sure to teach them the important key terms so they understand the structure. Use this as a stand alone lesson or a pre-lesson for the Putting a Play Together! lesson.

Use this lesson to help your ELs compare and contrast supporting characters from excerpted texts. It can be a stand-alone lesson or support the lesson Understanding Character Traits, Understanding Plot Lesson Part III.

In this suffix lesson plan, your students will practice using the suffixes -er and -est to create comparative and superlative adjectives.

Use this lesson to help your ELs understand how to write effective nonfiction text summaries. It can be a stand-alone lesson or a support lesson to the Create a Non-fiction Text Summary lesson plan.