Second graders love field trips and sharing their opinions! This fun lesson combines both, as students must convince their teacher to take them on a field trip by practicing their opinion writing and using paragraph structure.

Students are often taught that written pieces should be long and detailed, but this isn't the case when it comes to summaries. This lesson gives students the chance to practice keeping summaries concise in a fun and engaging way.

Holy cow! Did President George W. Bush really have a longhorn named Ofelia as a pet? Students learn about wacky White House pets in this fun research activity that includes “president interviews” and a pet choice writing page.

Thinking about who, what, when, where, and why isn’t just for detectives! Students will practice gleaning important information from texts using these questions and a few other tools.

Smaller dictionaries that are totally relevant to the material being read? In this lesson, students will learn that these miraculously really do exist and go by the name of glossaries!

Arts and crafts, Venn diagrams, and literature all come together as students compare and contrast stories. Opportunities for student creativity are endless!

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."

Story elements help to bring beloved fairy tales to life in this literacy lesson. Your students will learn to identify the title, author, setting, characters, problem, and solution in a fiction text.

Look at history! In this lesson, guide students through an exploration of the context, causes, and effects of the Transcontinental Railroad, and help them practice identifying the main idea and supporting details in a nonfiction text.

Verbs are the only kind of word that have tenses. Some of them are standard and easy to learn, while others are irregular and tricky. This lesson will review verb tense changes that follow the regular pattern and those oddballs that don't.

Students will enjoy thinking about subject and verbs as two parts that must work together to form a clear idea. Students will create mixed-up sentences as a class, then write funny stories that peers can revise.

Students will become sentence construction gurus as they learn to craft more sophisticated sentences. Specifically, young writers will use subordinating conjunctions to combine dependent and independent clauses to craft complex sentences.

Once students have selected a topic related to a piece of literature they have read and mapped out their argument, this lesson will help them turn their prewriting into an essay.

By creating an interactive notebook template, kids will help themselves remember the correct ways to use the commonly confused words to, too, two, there, and their. Young writers will love improving their writing skills with this lesson.

Are your students having trouble taming run-on sentences into a more manageable length? In this lesson, your students will learn to not only recognize a run-on sentence, but also how to stop it in its tracks.

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 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.

This lesson gives your students practice researching an inventor to write an informative essay. Students will use a graphic organizer to take notes on the research they conduct in the library or on the internet.

Help your students strengthen their argument writing! Using the strategy of writing advantages and disadvantages, students will delve into writing strong reasons that are rooted in evidence.

It’s time to make an educated guess! In this lesson, your students will practice using their background knowledge and evidence from the text to make inferences in nonfiction pieces about Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cesar Chavez.

Inventors and their novel inventions are always a thrilling topic! In the lesson Researching Black Inventors, first graders and second graders are encouraged to research the rich history of African American inventors. This engaging lesson plan provides students with an opportunity to learn all about inventors they find interesting and the impact those inventors have on the world. Perfect for Black History Month, this learning activity highlights informational writing skills and helps build students' vocabulary.

Improve your students' comprehension of non-fictional reading through this lesson that teaches them about text features. Students will find their own text features and explain why they aid in the reading process.

Roll up your sleeves and get out the magnifying glasses! In this lesson, your students will practice finding supportive details and examples in informational texts.

This winter-themed lesson plan, which incorporates the book Tree of Cranes by Allen Say, teaches students about Japanese traditions and customs. They will review the basic elements of a narrative story, and then write their own narratives about a special event or moment in their life.

Did you know that Reader's Theater promotes fluency and builds students' reading confidence? Use this lesson to inspire your students to practice reading and understanding text in the drama genre.

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