Graphic novels, animated stories, and storytelling videos pop with enhanced meaning, tone and beauty. Use this lesson plan with a mentor text to teach your students to note how such features contribute to the reader’s experience.

Bram Stoker's Dracula has inspired feelings of fear and morbid curiosity for over a century. With this lesson plan, your students will get a taste of the literary work while learning about the myth behind vampires.

Let's learn about natural disasters. After reading through some informational texts, students will use their close reading skills to answer questions about different types of disasters.

Make history come alive with this interactive lesson! Students will have a blast presenting a "living timeline" to help their classmates understand the events of the Revolutionary War.

Knock, knock! It’s the U.S. Census Bureau! In this lesson plan, students analyze primary sources in the form of census data to do research that helps them answer questions about famous people and the time period during which they lived.

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.

Keep it simple! Teach your students to write a summary using the Somebody-Wanted-But-So-Then frame for analyzing a story.

Give your class a deeper understanding of theme with this art and poetry-focused lesson plan about theme. By the end of the lesson, students will understand what theme is and how to determine theme in a piece of writing, such as a poem.

Bring theme to life with Chris Van Allsburg's The Sweetest Fig, a story with a great message for young readers to discover. This lesson pairs a wonderful read-aloud with activities and fun videos to keep your students engaged.

Give students many opportunities to see how visuals can influence a story's meaning. Show off your acting skills and read a great book to help them learn!

Encourage your students to translate their understanding of theme to poetry. In this lesson, students will evaluate the theme of poems by sketching pictures and citing text evidence.

Use this lesson to help your ELs learn key vocabulary terms that they will see in future lessons about the American Revolution. It can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support to the lesson A Living Timeline: The American Revolution.

Use this lesson to help your ELs understand how to use conjunctions when contrasting information from two different characters’ perspectives. It can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support to the Whose Point Is It Anyway? lesson.

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.

Use a student-friendly glossary and sentence frames to learn about wild weather! Scaffolds will help your students answer text-dependent questions. This lesson can be paired with the main Informational Text: Close Reading lesson.

Use this lesson to help your ELs understand details in a sentence by identifying conditional phrases. It can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support to the lesson Comparing Primary and Secondary Sources.

Use this lesson to help your ELs evaluate the purpose of text features and justify their answers. It can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support for the lesson Comparing Nonfiction Text Features.

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.

Show and prove! Use this lesson plan and say farewell to fiction reading logs of yore, as your students (literally) draw connections across theme, cause, and effect.

Use this lesson to help your ELs summarize information from a text and use context clues to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words. This lesson can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support to the Day 4 section of the Star Unit lesson.

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.

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.

In this lesson plan, students will discuss characteristics of a hero and how to get information from texts to understand why a person is considered a hero. Partner discussions will help students have a deeper understanding.