Reading Lessons

When a ceiling fan blade breaks off of the motor while spinning at high-speed, in a classroom full of students, what happens next?  This lesson and story will engage your students with the humor ... and terror ... of a real-life classroom near-disaster.

In this lesson, your middle-school students will be engaged in exploring and analyzing author's craft techniques.  Students will read an exciting true story set in a classroom much like their own. Then they embark upon a journey to identify author's craft techniques that are specifically chosen to enhance the tone and imagery of this story.  

Have you ever cursed something only to find out later that your curse came true?  This lesson and story will bring laughter and awe as your students learn how a moment of frustration turned into some gravely cursed flying squirrels.

Your students will engage in a debate-centered activity in this lesson where they work from pairs to whole-class debates to agree on a major theme and the three best pieces of evidence from this story to prove the theme.  This lesson is active and highly creative as your students become better at staking a claim on theme with solid proof from the three main parts of the story.

If you could have three wishes, what would you wish for? In this fictional story by Judity Gorog, Melinda Alice gets to wish for anything her heart desires!  But what happens when she becomes careless with her words?

This lesson guides your students through predictions and inferences using pivotal scenes from a new story.  In groups, they will analyze five key scenes trying to predict if the scenes are from the beginning, middle, or end.  Then, as they hear the story read aloud in the video, students will find evidence to verify or correct their original predictions.  This is a great activity for group conversation and proving your thinking using key evidence from all parts of a story.

This true story details Tom's morning run along the beach with such vivid imagery and beautiful vocabulary that it will become a classic model for any reading/writing unit on the power of imagery.

This true story details Marta's life as a poor, minority student trying to make the best of an unfair situation in life.

This true story in a series of episodes that helps you understand more about the way the character responds or changes.

This fun, fictional story by Shirley Jackson is the inspiration for a unit of lessons covering reading skills of theme, conversation, debate, character change, plot elements, and inferences.  This mini-unit is completed in three lessons, or approximately 90-120 minutes.

Students use a mystery strategy to practice sequencing evidence to prove theme for a short story.  Then, the groups will prepare claims on the theme and proof from the evidence they've collected.