Kindergarten - 3rd Grade Common Core Writing Strategies Lesson Plans

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.

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

Expose your students to the wonderful genre of drama, but be sure to teach them the important key terms so they understand the structure. Use this as a stand alone lesson or a pre-lesson for the Putting a Play Together! lesson.

What is a robot? What can robots do? Computer programmers tell robots what to do by creating a sequence of commands. In this lesson, students work in pairs to program a robot to act out the story from the mini story book My Friend.

Students will have a blast turning a reading passage into a Reader's Theater skit. This lesson teaches them to use dialogue to help readers understand the experiences of different characters.

Change is inevitable, even for story characters! In this lesson, your students will determine how a character changes throughout a story by focusing on the character’s dialogue and actions.

Featuring Stephanie's Ponytail by Robert Munsch, this creative writing lesson gives students the chance to turn themselves into the main characters of emotion-packed short stories.

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.

There is great wonder in building things and taking them apart. Use this grammar lesson with your students to teach them how to construct and deconstruct contractions while correctly using an apostrophe.

This lesson challenges young learners to add dialogue to their writing. Students will love using their creativity to write personal narratives.

What adventures can a reindeer, candy cane, and a snowman embark on? Let’s find out! In this writing lesson, students will write a Christmas-themed narrative incorporating characters, setting, problem, and solution.

Give your students a chance to hone their reading comprehension skills as they learn about the characters, setting, and plot of their favorite fiction books by creating a story map.

Your students will learn all about what makes a fictional character special when they become character detectives! Use this lesson to introduce the concept of using key details from a text to gather information.

Teach young authors how to "hook" readers with this hands-on lesson. By examining novels and developing their own introductions, students will be able to hone their writing skills.

Use this story map and your choice of short fiction passages to develop your students’ reading comprehension skills with this group reading lesson.

Are your second graders struggling with reading comprehension? Help them understand how prosody can help their understanding of the text with this reading lesson plan.

Help your ELs use transition words as they make predictions and summarize a short fictional text. This lesson can be used as a stand alone activity or a support lesson.

Create conversations about character changes! Use this lesson plan as a stand-alone lesson for practicing sequencing words in evidenced-based claims about a character, or before the Characters Change Just Like We Do lesson.

Food and grocery shopping will take on a different perspective for students by the end of this activity. Students may even find themselves keeping a closer eye on their pennies!

Help your ELs identify the characters and their dialogue in a story. This lesson can stand alone or be used as a pre-lesson for the Action! Students Create Reader’s Theater lesson.

Figurative language can be difficult, especially for ELs. With the help of context clues and exposure to common idioms, it can be a piece of cake! Use this as a stand-alone lesson or as a pre-lesson for the Take a Walk with Idioms lesson.

Use this lesson to teach students about the importance of reading fluently to support comprehension. Use as a stand alone activity or a support for the Increasing Reading Stamina and Comprehension lesson plan.

This lesson provides students with the opportunity to critically think about data. Use this lesson alongside Line Plots: Representing the Length of Classroom Items or as a stand alone lesson.

Emphasize student understanding and reasoning! This lesson plan helps learners solve story problems using sense-making strategies. This can be used alongside the lesson Solving Word Problems or as a stand-alone lesson.

Let’s put it all together! In this lesson, students will explore the different parts of a drama or play. By the end of the lesson they will be able to define terminology related to plays and give examples of the unique genre features!

Who doesn’t love learning about animals? Engage students in research as they write informational books about animals.

Students love comic books! Channel their excitement for this fun genre and get their creative writing juices flowing. By writing their own comic strips, students will be practicing composing, sequencing, and using dialogue.