Cats are the best! Pizza is better! My teacher rules! In Fact or Opinion: Part 1, your students will combine reading and writing to learn about the differences between facts and opinions and how those differences are communicated.

Marie Curie’s monumental achievements in chemistry and physics are remarkable. In this lesson, your students will read two accounts of her life, integrate the details, and assess the importance of having more than one source of information.

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.

In this lesson, students will use conjunctions to compare and contrast scary stories. It can be taught independently or used as a pre-lesson to Using Story Elements to Compare and Contrast Fiction Texts.

Give your class the "write" tools they need to become excellent authors. In this literary lesson, students use their knowledge of author's purpose to successfully write pieces that persuade, inform, and entertain.

Through this lesson, your students will use academic vocabulary to discuss character traits, author's purpose, and the sequence of events in a story.

Make it move! In this lesson, students will learn about energy and make connections between force and energy. Through a hands-on approach, students will work in teams to construct and report on their experiments.

Teach young authors how to "hook" readers with this hands-on lesson. By examining novels and developing their own introductions, students will be able to hone their writing skills.

Engage students in analysis by examining archetypes in fairy tales. Teach students to identify heroes and villains in fairy tales, examine patterns, and create their own fairy tales to express their knowledge of archetypes.

Characters, settings, and events, oh my! In this lesson, students will dig deeper into each of these components and learn to provide specific details from their texts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This lesson plan integrates art and reading to create a character by personifying a pumpkin. Your students will enjoy writing a story about a character that they have created!

This is a lesson about the immigration procedures at Ellis Island. Students will learn about the process and creatively write about what it was like for immigrants to pass through Ellis Island.

Your students’ understanding will reach its peak when they ask detail-seeking questions from observations made about plateaus, mesas, canyons, and buttes. Students will use illustrations and text to assist in their questions and answers.

This fun combination of scavenger hunt and bingo is sure to please young learners. Not only will your students increase their knowledge of text features, they'll also enjoy a selection of engaging games.

Every storyteller needs to understand beginning, middle, and end. The same goes for young readers. Help your students grasp the concept of story sections with this hands-on sequencing lesson.

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.

Strengthen your students' understanding of figurative language by helping them interpret visual puns! Students will use a webpage to help them understand puns in their future reading and writing endeavors.

This lesson focuses on how punctuation affects reading fluency and comprehension using graphic organizers and sentence stems. Use this lesson as a stand-alone activity or a support for the Punctuation and Prosody lesson plan.

Get students curious about reading with these activities designed to support comprehension. This lesson plan can be used alone or with the Main Ideas and Details lesson plan.

Discover a new tool for creative assessments and lessons! In this lesson, students will investigate Adobe Spark using Agency by Design thinking routines to help them understand how they can use technology to communicate ideas.

In this lesson, your students will use guiding questions as a way to organize their thoughts about non-fiction reading. They will also gain an understanding of some of the factors that led to the colonization of the Middle Atlantic States.

What’s the deal with all of those text features? Use this handy lesson plan to help your second graders answer that very question.