Frederick Douglass was an influential black man in U.S. history. In this lesson, the historical context is set for students so that they can conduct their own research on Frederick Douglass, using a graphic organizer and multiple sources, before writing an informational essay on him. Ideal for fourth and fifth grade students, this lesson plan not only gives students practice in research and essay-writing skills, it also has them exploring a fascinating part of our country's history.

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.

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.

Second grade students will step into the author’s shoes as they hunt for evidence to determine what a nonfiction author’s purpose might be.

Use pantomime performance to drive your students to predict, question, and cite main ideas. With this dramatic lesson plan, your class will craftily capture information on a graphic organizer to boost their reading comprehension!

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.

In this lesson, students will practice listening comprehension skills after reading “The Paper Bag Princess” together as a class. Afterward, students will role-play, make inferences, and use summarization to strengthen literacy skills.

Use this lesson to help your ELs quickly find information on a specific topic by looking for a noun and its pronouns in a nonfiction text. It can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support for the lesson Ecosystems Explained.

ELs will get a chance to practice their listening and reading comprehension skills as they answer questions about the key details in a read-aloud text. Use as a stand-alone or pre-lesson for the Questions for Comprehension lesson plan.