4th - 8th Grade Common Core English Language Arts Lesson Plans

The hardest part of writing an essay can be the first few steps. This lesson and accompanying graphic organizers will help students map out their ideas and practice crafting paragraphs. With this support, your writers will be off and running!

In this lesson, students will use their creativity, a graphic organizer, and a fun story to learn about character analysis.

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.

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.

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.

Help your English language learners master effective communication with this lesson, which covers the past, present, and future verb tenses. From reading to writing, kids will get the practice they need to communicate here.

Students will learn how to identify story elements and create a short and sweet summary. They will fill out a graphic organizer and solidify their understanding by creating illustrations to show major plot points that they find themselves!

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.

Mix-ups of "there," "they're," and "their" happen way too often. There is no better time than now to help your students get their homophones down. They're sure to have fun with this interactive English lesson!

Students often understand the basic conventions of writing, but may need support in incorporating these skills into their work. In this lesson, students will review some of the more common capitalization and punctuation errors and apply their editing skills to real writing.

It’s time to make some verb verdicts! In this lesson, your students will decide if present tense verbs have been correctly changed to reflect the past tense. A focal point of this lesson is the use of irregular verbs. The jury is out!

Improve your students' sentence variation with this lesson that teaches them how to use conjunctions to improve the flow of their writing.

Mae Jemison was the first African American female astronaut to enter space! Use this lesson plan to help your students get to know this prominent scientist, and determine what makes her an influencial person.

Students put their knowledge of animal adaptations to the test when they create a new creature with its own unique set of adaptations!

Help students decode tricky language in the Declaration of Independence with an integrated vocabulary and history lesson. After reviewing vocabulary as a class, students will rewrite the Declaration of Independence in kid-friendly language.

If your students are screaming, make sure they are grammatically correct! In this pronoun lesson plan, your students will identify and use a variety of pronouns to replace common and proper nouns.

Your little poets will love how their creative writing abilities will grow with this lesson about similes and metaphors. Students engage in fun activities to learn about similes and metaphors and write comparisons as directed.

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

Teach your students to edit peer writing with a three-step process that will improve their writing skills and overall confidence. In this lesson, students will practice editing short pieces of writing using specific criteria.

Are your students ready to see narratives from a different perspective? This reading lesson will get students excited about discovering first- and third-person points of view.

Walk your young writers through the letter-writing process, including formatting, drafting, and editing. Use the checklist to ensure that all of the important parts of the letter are included and the details are polished.

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.

Get your students excited about geography with a lesson on Earth's oceans. After reading two different texts, they'll be ready to dive right into ocean paragraph writing.

Write right with homophones! This interactive lesson will help students with their understanding of homophones by differentiating homophones through motion and how they are used in sentences.

Students become word artists as they use ordinary pictures to practice creating detailed descriptions. This technique helps your class learn how to paint a picture with words.

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.

A deeper comprehension of clauses and conjunctions will help your young writers understand the building blocks of language. Practice with conjunctions will also help them create more complex sentences and correct run-on sentences.

Sometimes looking inside a word can help determine the meaning just like using context clues! In this lesson, students will learn to use roots and affixes as clues to the meaning of a word.

Young readers will love this story-filled reading comprehension lesson. It's packed with engaging exercises designed to help students become better at looking for details and annotating passages of text.

Your ELs will compare and contrast two similar stories while strengthening their grammar skills related to noun and pronoun agreement in this lesson. Use it as a stand-alone lesson or as a precursor to the lesson Venn Diagram Collage.