In the Drive-In Movies, young Gary Soto wants his mother to take him and his siblings to the drive-in movies, a special treat. His plan is to be very good and to do lots of chores one Saturday morning and afternoon in order to impress his mother. Unfortunately, he works so hard at weeding, mowing, and waxing the car that he falls asleep during the movie. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.

As a way to support teachers with English Language Arts (ELA) instruction during the pandemic, the NCDPI ELA team created choice boards featuring standards-aligned ELA activities.The intended purpose of these choice boards is to provide a way for students to continue standards-based learning while schools are closed. Each activity can be adapted and modified to be completed with or without the use of digital tools. Many activities can also be repeated with different texts. These standards-based activities are meant to be a low-stress approach to reinforcing and enriching the skills learned during the 2019-2020 school year. The choice boards are to be used flexibly by teachers, parents, and students in order to meet the unique needs of each learner.Exploration activities are provided for a more self-directed or guided approach to independent learning for students. These activities and sites should be used as a way to explore concepts, topics, skills, and social and emotional competencies that interest the learner. 

Rachel wakes up on her eleventh birthday feeling as if she’s still ten—and nine, and eight, and all the ages that came before and the day just gets worse from there. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.

In this lesson, students create text sets and use them to practice three strategies for reading for information. Students select a topic they want to explore and work in small groups to compile a set of texts related to their topic.

Students will develop awareness of the fable literary form by discussing the terms anthropomorphic and personification, and will understand that authors write fables to point out or criticize problems and to impart moral lessons. Students will discuss and understand what a moral is. Students will write a fable with a beginning, middle and end, and with a moral in hopes of redefining traditional fables for our modern world.

Students work together in small groups to read, discuss, and analyze fairy tales. After compiling a list of common elements, students collaborate on their own original fairy tales—based on events from their own lives or the lives of someone they know. Each student decides what kind of experience to write about, composes and revises a fairy tale, and then presents their story to the rest of the class.

In this lesson, students analyze and discuss familiar superheroes and super-villains to expand their understanding of character types and conventions. Then students consider social issues that confront their everyday reality and respond by incorporating those issues into the creation of their own superheroes or super-villains as well as the settings the superheroes or super-villains operate in.

This is an excerpt from "Tomb Robbers" a story based on Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, the first emperor of China. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Franklin R. Chang-Diaz is an immigrant from Costa Rica who began thinking about space at age seven when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space. After going through many obstacles he was accepted to NASA and became “the first Hispanic to be in the space program for the long run". In this CCSS lesson, students will explore his story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.

In this lesson, students participate in a Socratic seminar discussing a person's right to refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

In this lesson students learn to formulate effective questioning techniques and understand the basic characteristics of the interview process.

Two female cousins spend their life doing everything together. One night they realize they are both in love with the Moon and wish to marry him. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

This unit develops students’ abilities to analyze arguments from a range of perspectives on energy and hydraulic fracturing. Students also learn to develop, write and revise their own evidence-based arguments.

This unit develops students’ abilities to read closely for textual details and compare authors’ perspectives through an examination of a series of texts about wolves.

This activity emphasizes the importance of teaching reading and writing strategies for students to use with informational text.

This expository text selection outlines the efforts of the Chinese people to build the Great Wall to protect them from the Mongol invaders and describes how the wall led to the eventual fall of the empire. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this history through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Do folktales, myths, and fables all have nonhuman characters? Do they all express a lesson or moral for readers to take away? Students use a semantic feature analysis to find out in this lesson. A semantic feature analysis, a comprehension strategy that helps students identify characteristics associated with related words or concepts, is used to compare folktales, myths, and fables. Students begin with an introduction to the strategy and a teacher-directed lesson in how to use the strategy to analyze a folktale. In subsequent sessions, students continue to practice the strategy in small groups by analyzing myths and fables. After students have read and analyzed the texts, they reflect on how semantic feature analyses helped improve their understanding of their reading.

A majority of students in grades 4 to 6 are beyond decoding instruction and need more assistance with comprehension to help them become successful, independent readers. Strategic reading allows students to monitor their own thinking and make connections between texts and their own experiences. Based on the Guided Comprehension Model developed by Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Allen, this lesson introduces students to the comprehension strategy of making connections. Students learn the three types of connections (text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world) using a double-entry journal. They also learn about the life of Cesar Chavez and his work to promote civil rights.

In this recurring lesson, students use an anticipation guide to preview and make predictions about texts. The lesson begins with teacher-directed whole-group instruction in which students are introduced to the concept of previewing and guided in completing a prepared anticipation guide for Teammates by Peter Golenbock. Students are then given an opportunity to complete a portion of the anticipation guide independently. In the days that follow, students work in both teacher-guided and student-facilitated groups to extend their use of the previewing strategy with other texts. Finally, students discuss as a class how using anticipation guides helped them better understand the reading.