This teachers guide for Somewhere There is Still a Sun by Michael Gruenbaum with Todd Hasak-Lowy includes discussion questions and prompts for interpretation for each part of the book, assignments and worksheets, ideas to integrate visual media, and writing assignment ideas.

Story Maps are used for teaching students to work with story structure for better comprehension. This technique uses visual representations to help students organize important elements of a story. Students learn to summarize the main ideas, characters, setting, and plot of an assigned reading.

Some of the most the most essential works of literature in the world are examples of epic poetry, such as The Odyssey and Paradise Lost. This lesson introduces students to the epic poem form and to its roots in oral tradition.

A student interactive resource in which students read between the lines by using the power of inference, predict what will happen next in a story, and identify the main ideas in what they read.

Summarizing teaches students how to take a large selection of text and reduce it to the main points for more concise understanding. Upon reading a passage, summarizing helps students learn to determine essential ideas and consolidate important details that support them. It is a technique that enables students to focus on key words and phrases of an assigned text that are worth noting and remembering.

An interactive resource in which students summarize and identify the main idea of select texts.

Worksheets and Powerpoint lessons to help students of differing levels summarize selected passages.

Tasha, a thirteen year old girl has to babysit her little 7 year old brother, Junior, because her mom is getting a job over the summer. Tasha really didn't want to and would do anything but babysit Junior. Her mom gave Tasha a long list of rules. Junior basically only had one: he was to listen to his sister. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments. Includes printable copies of text.

In this lesson, students are introduced to the genre of American tall tales. Students are exposed to several traditional tall tales, then prompted to write an original tall tale set in contemporary America. The tall tale must address a current event or issue and must feature a "larger-than-life" main character. The students use exaggeration and hyperbole to portray the way in which the main character resolves the issue or problem. Students then dramatize their tall tales for the class.

A teachers guide for five Jack Henry books by Jack Gantos (Jack Adrift, Jack on the Tracks, Heads or Tails, Jack's New Power, Jack's Black Book), including an activity to complete throughout reading, discussion questions for each book as well as questions to draw connections between themes, and ways to connect themes and key subjects in the books to other areas of education.

In this lesson, students share personal versions of fairy tales from their memories with each other and listen, analyze, and paraphrase the tales' differences and similarities.

Explore the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost and learn how the poem’s structure develops theme, setting, and plot as you complete this interactive tutorial.

Students will use the fictional text being studied in class to take a topic and create a thematic statement based on it.  Overview: Students will use the fictional text being studied in class to take a topic and create a thematic statement based on it. Subject:English Language Arts Level:Middle School, High School Grades:Grade 8, Grade 9, Grade 10 Material Type:Lesson Plan Time Required:Less than 60 minAuthor:Kinsi King Date Added:11/19/2019

I use this editable Google Slides graphic organizer with my middle school ELA students to help them create and prove thematic statements before extending their thoughts into a longer paragraph. (This resource aligns to the part of RL.6.2 in which students are required to determine the theme. It does not address summary.)

Worksheets to help students identify and/or reveal theme in seleceted passages about fables.

Worksheets to help students identify and/or reveal theme in seleceted short story passages.

In this lesson, students study issues related to independence and notions of manliness in Ernest Hemingway’s “Three Shots” as they conduct in-depth literary character analysis, consider the significance of environment to growing up and investigate Hemingway’s Nobel Prize-winning, unique prose style. In addition, they will have the opportunity to write and revise a short story based on their own childhood experiences and together create a short story collection.

This teacher's guide for Totally Joe by James Howe contains discussion questions, activities, and research assignments.

This teacher's guide to Tracks by Diane Lee Wilson includes a summary of the text, discussion questions, activities, and research assignments.