In order to fully comprehend reading materials, students need to understand the cause-and-effect relationships that appear in a variety of fiction and nonfiction texts. In this lesson, students learn cause-and-effect relationships through the sharing of a variety of Laura Joffe Numeroff picture books in a Reader's Workshop format. Using online tools or a printed template, students create an original comic strip via the writing prompt, "If you take a (third) grader to."  Students use various kinds of art to illustrate their strip and publish and present their completed piece to peers in a read-aloud format.

In this lesson, The Jolly Postman is used as an authentic example to discuss letter writing as a genre. Students explore the letters to the storybook characters delivered by The Jolly Postman. They then learn how to categorize their own examples of mail. The Jolly Postman uses well-known storybook characters, from fairy tales and nursery rhymes, as recipients of letters. This children's storybook is therefore ideal for using as a review of these genres of literature and as a means of helping children begin to explore rhyme and a variety of writing styles. Several pieces of literature appropriate for use with this lesson are suggested.

Paraphrasing helps students make connections with prior knowledge, demonstrate comprehension, and remember what they have read. Through careful explanation and thorough modeling by the teacher in this lesson, students learn to use paraphrasing to monitor their comprehension and acquire new information. They also realize that if they cannot paraphrase after reading, they need to go back and reread to clarify information. In pairs, students engage in guided practice so that they can learn to use the strategy independently. Students will need prompting and encouragement to use this strategy after the initial instruction is completed. The lesson can be extended to help students prepare to write reports about particular topics.

In Legend of the Lost Emerald, kids take on the role of maritime archaeologists exploring shipwrecks on the Great Lakes. Like real archaeologists, players use sonar and GPS coordinates, dive down to take underwater photos, and search for clues in historical artifacts, like letters and ship manifests, to tell the story of each shipwreck. We teamed up with maritime archaeologists at Wisconsin Sea Grant and amazing teacher fellows from across the state of Wisconsin to design a game that works in the classroom and introduces kids to the tools and practices of the field.

Teachers can use this game to introduce kids to historical practices and themes from ecology, technology, and Wisconsin history. Students will learn about the role of maritime archaeologists, archivists, historians, and museum curators. The game introduces four different time periods in maritime history, ranging from wooden schooners in the mid-1800s to steel freighters in the 1960s.

I use this resource in my classroom to conference with students, specifically in reading class. The Google Sheet includes tabs for the student's name, date, title of book, page number they are currently on, a connected standard I may be assessing at the time, and notes about their performance. Students can also read a page or two aloud as a quick fluency check.

This is a lesson for tropical rainforests that fits best for third- through fifth-grade students. There are multiple reading and writing strategies implemented within the lesson. Throughout the lessons, there will be opportunities to build upon prior knowledge, write, draw, and listen to sound effects of the rainforest. Students will use graphic organizers and websites to aid in the understanding and learning of rainforests. There are also extension lessons for students to create a list of questions in small groups to research. Throughout these lessons the students will be exposed to multiple media sources. 

This lesson uses the book Thunder Rose by Jerdine Nolen to reinforce the common elements, or text structure, of tall tales. As the text is read aloud, students examine the elements of the book that are characteristic of tall tales. Then using what they've learned over the course of the unit and lesson, they write tall tales of their own.

Our goal is for our students to become proficient readers and writers who display agency and independence. This interactive hyperdoc training module, about UDL and Reading Workshop, is designed to help educators develop an ever-growing toolkit of strategies that will remove barriers to learning and create options for how instruction is presented, how students express their ideas, and how we can engage students in their learning.