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.

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."

This lesson will have your students learn to compare and contrast using both a classic fairy tale and a fractured versions of a fairy tale.

This lesson will help your students summarize short stories and describe how characters respond to challenges using a story map. Use this lesson as a stand-alone activity or a support lesson for the Story Mapping Group Work lesson plan.

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.

Mae Jemison was the first African American female astronaut to enter space! Use the Who Is Mae Jemison? lesson plan to get to know this prominent scientist and entrepreneur. Students will read about Mae and then answer questions about her.

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.

Your students will learn academic vocabulary and use a graphic organizer to compare and contrast two short stories. Use this as a stand-alone lesson or as an introduction to the Comparing and Contrasting Short Stories lesson plan.