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.

This is a fun rap that covers the five main elements of a story: setting, plot, characters, conflict and theme.

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.

This module uses literature and informational text such as My Librarian Is a Camel to introduce students to the power of literacy and how people around the world access books. This module is intentionally designed to encourage students to embrace a love of literacy and reading.

Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .

In this eight-week module, students explore the questions: “Who is the wolf in fiction?” and “Who is the wolf in fact?” They begin by analyzing how the wolf is characterized in traditional stories, folktales, and fables. Then they research real wolves by reading informational text. Finally, for their performance task, students combine their knowledge of narratives with their research on wolves to write a realistic narrative about wolves.

Into the Book is a reading comprehension multimedia resource. Students learn to use reading comprehension strategies including: prior knowledge, making connections, questioning, visualizing, inferring, summarizing, evaluating and synthesizing. This resource includes educational videos, online activities, professional learning videos and teacher tools. Discover more at reading.ecb.org.

John Schumacher (aka Mr. Schu) is a blogger, a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, and the Ambassador of School Libraries for Scholastic Book Fairs®. You could say every day is a giant book party for this teacher-librarian! In fact, Library Journal named him "The Xtreme Librarian" for the high level of exertion – along with some gears and stunts – he uses to get kids reading, and Instructor Magazinenamed him a Cool Teacher for redefining what it means to be a teacher-librarian.
This resource is a link to his Blog. The Blog hosts children's book trailers he has created. He explains "how" he created them.

In this lesson, the teacher explains the difference between thin (factual) and thick (inferential) questions and then models how to compose question webs by thinking aloud while reading. Students observe how to gather information about the topic and add it to question webs in the form of answers or additional questions. Students practice composing thin and thick questions and monitor their comprehension by using question webs in small-group reading. This practice extends knowledge of the topic and engages readers in active comprehension.

This lesson can be added to the study of the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, specifically when it’s time to release your classroom monarchs in the fall. If your class isn’t studying monarchs, but the monarch migration is observed in your area, this is a lesson that could be used to find out more.The pursuits addressed are skills and intellectualism. The skills in this case are reading a map and gathering details from a text. Intellect is the practice of using skills to increase the understanding of the world around you, the practice of reflecting on how one uses a skill. According to Gholdy Muhammad in Cultivating Genius, Intellectualism is knowledge of people, places, things and concepts and the ability to put this knowledge into action. As learning takes place, one asks, “What am I becoming smarter about?” The students are using the pursuit of intellectualism to discover how science research works to discover new things about the world around them. 

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.

A multi-age primary classroom teacher uses formative assessment as a barometer of student learning. She records anecdotal notes about her students' reading progress within an assessment notebook and references the notes for future instruction.

After reading Water Hole Waiting by Jane Kurtz and Christopher Kurtz, or another book that has a well-developed setting, students work as a class to chart the use of the three elements of setting in the story, using specific words and examples from the text. Students then discuss the techniques that the book’s author used to develop the setting, making observations and drawing conclusions about how authors make the setting they write about vivid and believable. Next, students work in small groups to analyze the setting in another picture book, using an online graphic organizer. Finally, students apply what they have learned about how authors develop good settings to a piece of their own writing.