Similes, metaphors, and idioms are some of the most widely used literary devices in both speaking and writing. Students will review each of these and practice creating some of their own.

Are the stories the same or different? You decide! Use this lesson with your students to practice comparing the story elements in two fictional stories written by the same author.

Most students know the first verse of The Star Spangled Banner, but not the rest of the song or the history behind it. In this civics lesson, students will dive deeper into the national anthem by deciphering and summarizing each verse.

Friendly letters are under construction! In this lesson, students will learn the unique parts of a friendly letter as they practice the art of writing their own friendly letters.

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.

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.

So your students are going to write a narrative? Use these prewriting exercises to help them choose an idea and plan out their story.

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.

Do you have students who are constantly asking what, who, where, why, how, and when? It's your turn to ask now! Have them read various stories and ask them to answer these questions in this lesson.

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.

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.

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!

In this lesson, students engage in a fun activity that involves pulling out words from a brown lunch bag. Give your kids a fun way to prove that they've have mastered the rules of capitalization.

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

Use this lesson to teach your students to identify story elements and compare them to another text's story elements. This lesson can stand alone or be used as a pre-lesson for the Comparing Texts by the Same Author lesson.