Students find examples of adjectives in a shared reading. Then students "become" major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using powerful adjectives.

Character Perspective Charting allows students to compare multiple characters and their points of view to better understand a story.

Students explore what Carol Jago calls the place "where life and art intersect" by reading Nikki Giovanni's poem, "Nikki-Rosa," and then writing about childhood memories of their own.

Students investigate the effects of word choice in Robert Frost's "Choose Something Like a Star" to construct a more sophisticated understanding of speaker, subject, and tone.

Students analyze "choose your own adventure" stories and brainstorm to develop setting, characters, and plots for their own adventures stories and related Websites.

In this minilesson, students explore the use of dialogue tags such as "he said" or "she answered" in picture books and novels, discussing their purpose, form, and style.

Students select what they believe to be the most important word in a text that they have read and justify their choice using examples from the text.

Students explore how active and passive voices are appropriate to different audiences. They examine online resources, and then draw conclusions about verb use, which they apply to their own writing.

Students make purposeful choices for their reading materials, thinking about their reasons for reading a book and using strategies to match books to their abilities.

This resource is a small group lesson plan to introduce and practice the decoding strategy of chunking. This strategy has readers utilize smaller words/word parts they already know to help them read larger unfamiliar words.   

In this first unit of second grade, students read multiple versions of a classic fairy tale, Cinderella. Through reading various versions of the same story, students are not only exposed to a wide variety of cultures, but they are also challenged to think about how the culture, or setting, of the story influences the plot. In first grade fiction, students took a trip around the world, exploring a wide variety of themes and stories from all over, in order to build a foundational understanding that our world is made up of many diverse and unique cultures. This unit builds on the exposure to new cultures students received in first grade and provides an opportunity for students to explore the idea that even though cultures may appear to be different, there are many things embedded within the unique characteristics of different cultures that make them similar. Storytelling, and the role of storytelling, is one of those similarities. It is our hope that this unit, in connection with others in the sequence, helps students build empathy and understanding of the world around them.

The different versions of Cinderella help students understand the components of a fairy tale and the lessons associated with traditional fairy tales. Over the course of the unit, students will be challenged to ask and answer questions about the text and illustrations as a way of deepening their understanding of plot, setting, and characters. In the first section of the unit, students will focus deeply on the setting, characters, and plot of the different versions of Cinderella, learning to compare and contrast the nuances across different versions. In the second section of the unit, students will read Cinderella stories that vary from the traditional plot structure but still include the underlying theme that a person’s actions (good or bad) influence his/her life outcomes. In this section students will dive deeply into three texts to analyze different characters’ traits and how the author uses those traits to help reveal the lesson of the story.

RL.2.1: Ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why, and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in a text.
RL.2.2: Recount stories, including fables and folktales from diverse cultures, and determine their central message, lesson, or moral.
RL.2.5: Describe the overall structure of a story, including describing how the beginning introduces the story and the ending concludes the action.
RL.2.7: Use information gained from the illustrations and words in a print or digital text to demonstrate understanding of its characters, setting, or plot.
W.2.8: Recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.
SL.2.2: Recount or describe key ideas or details from a text read aloud or information presented orally or through other media.
L.2.4b: Determine the meaning of the new word formed when a known prefix is added to a known word (e.g., happy/unhappy, tell/retell).

Students become online authors in this lesson in which they write and post a short story using wiki technology.

Students and the teacher produce a class book through a group-writing activity, focusing on a basic before-during-after sequence of events.

Students hone their teamwork skills and play off each other's writing strengths as they participate in prewriting activities for a story to be written collaboratively by the whole class.

Using a collaborative story written by students, the teacher leads a shared-revising activity to help students consider content when revising, with students participating in the marking of text revisions.

This resource guide begins by outlining the theory underlying the literacy work and then lays out the framework for the supports included in the Readers series. Subsequent chapters describe and illustrate the specific content literacy and language development strategies that have been chosen as being of particularly high impact. Although most of the strategies can be used in multiple ways, we have chosen to present them as occurring "Before, €During€ and After Reading" because of the importance of this mental model in effective content literacy instruction.

Students use their five senses as a prewriting tool to guide their poetry writing as they compose free-form poems using imagery to describe a color.

Pat Mora's poem "Echoes" demonstrates that our senses are powerful tools for literary analysis and comprehension as students use their senses to discover new ways to read and write.

Multidimensional, challenging, and popular with students, comics provide an excellent way to introduce the concept of genres.