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.

Learn to use text formatting tools like capitalization, bold, underline, and italics to give emphasis to your writing.

In this lesson, ask students to compare and contrast two important African-American historical figures. Students will write an informational paragraph on the similarities and differences between W.E.B. Du Bois and George Washington Carver.

Describe the facts! This lesson teaches your ELs to identify adjectives and their important role as key details in informational texts. Use it as a stand-alone lesson or as support to the lesson Summarizing Nonfiction Texts.

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.

Articles are a simple yet critical part of speech. This lesson helps your fourth graders distinguish the three articles and understand how to use them correctly in sentences.

How can you see what your students are thinking while they read? Try reading response letters in your class. Students will practice formatting letters and learn to discuss their thinking about literature in writing.

Making inferences is a key skill to master before going on to read more difficult fictional texts in fifth grade. This lesson helps your students solidify their inference skills with a focus on citing evidence in fictional text.

In this lesson, students will identify nouns and pronouns as they distinguish between the main idea and supporting details. It may be taught on its own or used as support for the lesson Compare and Contrast Texts on the Same Topic.

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.

Take your fourth and fifth graders on a deep dive into the civil rights movement with this lesson on Amelia Boynton Robinson. A key activist in the movement, Amelia played a critical role in organizing the Selma to Montgomery march. Your students will read, annotate, and analyze her biography through multiple reads, before discussing the text with their classmates.

Close reading isn’t about just ticking through words on a page; it’s about absorbing ideas and expanding on them. In this lesson, students will use this strategy to make interpretations about a character's emotions through their actions.

Teach your students to ask and differentiate between recall questions and inferential questions. This lesson will help build a classroom culture around asking deep, inferential questions.

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.

Idioms will be a piece of cake when students finish this fun lesson! Students practice illustrating and explaining common idioms.

By analzying picture books, students will make connections between the text and the illustrations of a story. They will compare and contrast the text and the illustrations and reflect upon how they impact their comprehension of a text.

By fourth grade, most students are familiar with story elements such as setting, characters, and plot. In this lesson, students will compare and contrast the elements in two stories with similar themes.

In this lesson, Significance of "Let Freedom Ring" in MLK, Jr.'s Speech, students will be able to understand the allusion Martin Luther King, Jr. makes to the song "My Country 'Tis of Thee." Have students discuss allusions in this speech.

Kids will love learning some fun facts about elephants while developing their reading comprehension skills. Using T-charts and Venn diagrams, they'll analyze stories and explore different characteristics of fiction and nonfiction.

Charts, graphs, and diagrams are complex text features for students to decipher. Use this lesson to familiarize students with these features. It can be taught on its own or before the lesson Charts and Graphs and Diagrams, Oh My!

In this engaging lesson, students compare and contrast a firsthand account and a secondhand account of the same historical event: the sinking of the Titanic.

This lesson gives students a structure to help them summarize fiction texts. When they are skilled at summarizing, they will be more capable of exploring various fiction genres. Use it as a precursor to Fiction Genres Library Exploration.

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.