| Name |
Description |
| Huff and Puff: A Lesson Focused on the Force of the Wind | In this lesson students will be exploring the force of wind and its affect on objects. Students will use the engineering design process to sketch, build, and assess how their structure withstands different forces of wind. |
| Too Much Help: Keep Your Ear on the Ball | This lesson helps students learn how to offer and accept help from others. The story is about Davey, a new student who is blind and very independent. The students learn how to offer help, and Davey learns how to accept it. This lesson also addresses the following: answering questions about text, identifying how characters respond to events, and writing a narrative. |
| Charlotte’s Web: Point of View | In this lesson, students will work with their teacher and their classmates to read chapter one from the book, Charlotte's Web by E.B. White. Students will be asked to take a close look at characters' actions and motivations. As a summative assessment, students will identify and agree with a specific character's point of view, supporting their opinions with text-based evidence. |
| The Great Kapok Tree: A Study of Theme | During these lessons, students will read The Great Kapok Tree: A Tale of the Amazon Rain Forest by Lynne Cherry. They will learn about the importance of trees by learning new vocabulary, analyzing characters, and finding the theme of the story. |
| A Close Look at A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams | A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams is a delightful story of a family who faces the hardships of life together. The focus of these reading lessons is to identify story structure and discuss how the characters responded to challenges. After students complete several learning centers about the book, they will retell the story through writing using grade-appropriate conventions. |
| Sarah, Plain and Tall--Successful Summarizing and Character Study | Students will be reading the classic story Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan. They will discuss the major events of the story and how the characters reacted to these happenings. Students will get a lot of practice summarizing by writing a short summary of each chapter. They will also be tracking the characters' emotions and reactions throughout the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. |
| Fly Away Home: A Little Boy's Hope | In this lesson, students will work with their teacher and their classmates to read Fly Away Home by Eve Bunting. Students will tackle the idea of theme and symbolizim in this story by studying what a little brown bird means to the main character. Students will write about the theme of the story in an expository paragraph. |
| A Closer Look at Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain | Introduce your primary students to the rhythmic story of the African plains, Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain by Verna Aardema. This story is filled with rich vocabulary and rhyming patterns that allow students to interact with context clues and and answer questions about the story elements. |
| Charlie Anderson: Who Cat is This? | During this lesson, the students will become highly involved with the text Charlie Anderson by Barbara Abercrombie. The students will identify and describe the story elements with a focus on the character of Elizabeth. Students will write an expository paragraph about how she felt at the end of the story when she learned the truth. |
| Taking the "Worry" out of Wemberly | In this lesson, students will read the story Wemberly Worried by Kevin Henkes. Students will identify and discuss some of Wemberly's worries and share their opinion about them. The lesson will conclude with the students writing an opinion piece about Wemberly's school experience. |
| Learning about Theme with Brave Irene | Who doesn't love a theme! Students will use the book Brave Irene by William Steig to learn about themes. They will create a story map for the text and look closely at the problem and solution and how the main character changed throughout the story to determine the big idea. Students will demonstrate their understanding by writing about the theme and identifying parts of the story that support that thinking. |
| A Bat Adventure | In this lesson, students will describe how characters in a story respond to events and challenges after reading the story, Stellaluna. Students will answer comprehension questions pertaining to the story and demonstrate an understanding of key details. In addition, students will write an opinion piece in which they will introduce a topic, state an opinion, provide reasons to support their opinion, and end their writing with a closing statement. |
| Carnival | Written at a second grade level, in this MEA the students will use problem solving skills, two-digit addition, and knowledge of greater than and less than to rank order carnival games based on provided criteria. Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom. |
| Star-Belly Sneetches and What They Teach Us | This lesson allows students to dig deeply into a popular, fun fictional story by Dr. Seuss to determine the theme and the life lesson it provides. Students will work in groups to act out the story in a skit, participate in a brainstorming activity with higher-order thinking questions, and design a creative response poster incorporating the story's theme to share with the class. Who doesn't love a Dr. Seuss classic that teaches students a lesson they can apply to their daily lives? |
| Hamming it up with Plot | Using the classic story, The Three Little Pigs, students will learn will use a plot line graphic organizer to record the action in this story. Students will use this plot line to help them retell the story in writing and record their paragraphs using technology such as Voice Thread. |
| Literature Circles: Round and Round We Go! | This lesson provides teachers with an effective approach to teaching students how to conduct literature circles independently. From developing classroom structures to teaching proper listening skills, students will increase reading comprehension skills while developing a natural interest in reading. |
| Questions of Character, Setting, and Plot | Students will read texts including characters that face a challenge or major event and describe the characters, setting, plot, and how they responded to the challenge. With a partner, students will read a book about other brave characters and create six comprehension questions that they will type on a computer. These questions will be presented to another partnership who will read the book and answer their classmates’ questions. |
| Charlotte’s Web: An Amazing Adventure about Friendship | In this lesson students will read Charlotte's Web by E.B. White and complete activities to help them comprehend the story. Students will "dig deep" into the novel by learning new vocabulary words, writing about the characters and their decisions, and taking part in some creative activities. Students will be assessed with higher order thinking questions that require them to draw on elements from the story and make connections. This lesson is for the first four chapters of Charlotte's Web. |
| CinderWHO? | Students will compare and contrast various versions of the Cinderella story through story element charting, partner discussions, carousel brainstorming, and semantic feature analysis. Students will think critically and hold grade-level appropriate dialogue about each story. Students will complete a piece of opinion writing stating which Cinderella story was their favorite and why they liked it. |
| Chrysanthemum, A Special Name | In this lesson students will listen to the story of Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes. Students will discuss how teasing can be hurtful and examine how characters respond to major events. To culminate this learning, students will write an opinion piece about the story including supporting reasons, transition words, and a conclusion. |
| Henry and Mudge Meet Leonardo da Vinci | This is an integrated lesson that includes an Engineering Design Challenge, a review of forces, an introduction to drawbridges, and a literary text Henry and Mudge and The Long Weekend by Cynthia Rylant. The Engineering Design Challenge is intended to help students investigate and generate explanations (SC.2.N.1.1) and practice working with money (MAFS.2.MD.3.8) as they design and build movable drawbridges. It is not intended as an initial introduction to these concepts. |
| Practicing Fluency with Shel Silverstein | Your students will be delighted to become immersed into the world of Shel Silverstein’s masterful poems. As students practice fluency and oral presentation, they will also learn how to identify various rhyme schemes and record their favorite poem. |
| Sarah, Plain and Tall: Character Study | In this lesson, students will work with their teacher and their classmates to look deeply at chapter one from the book Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan. Students will asked to answer discussio questions, determine the meaning of unfamiliar words, and make inferences about the main character. The lessons will end with the writing of an expository text and the main character's perspective. |
| The Moral of the Story | In this lesson, students will be introduced to several fables. They will learn the characteristics of a fable and learn that the lesson of a story is called the moral. Students will have the opportunity to idenify the moral of a fable and write an opinion piece about it. |
