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Love that Dog by Sharon Creech is a wonderful book to teach at the upper elementary level. Written in free verse poetry, the main character Jack learns to appreciate poetry thanks to his sensitive teacher Miss Stretchberry. This unit is packed with a variety of comprehension activities that will help your students grasp this novel at a deeper level. The activities reinforce previewing, vocabulary acquisition, visualization, citing evidence, answering open ended questions, summarizing, poetry t

A great lesson (2nd -4th grades) for opening up conversations with students about gender stereotypes. Help your students realize that stereotypes box us in to certain gender expectations. Teach your students to feel good about who they are and bust out of those gender stereotypes!

This comprehension activity facilitates a discussion around characters in a novel. It prompts students to go into more depth and to think about a character critically. Among other things, it requires the student to indentify both a character’s literal and figurative journey. It can be used as a jumping off place for a written Reading Response. When writing, students can expand on this graphic activity, and back up their assertions about a character using evidence from the text. A very versati

This student self-evaluation worksheet encourages children to reread their written work, and reflect on their paragraph writing. It includes a prompt to have the child read their paragraph work to a peer and receive feedback on their writing. The student reflects on their topic and concluding sentences, as well as supporting details. Additionally, it elicits reflection on the editing process and what they find challenging around editing. This also works very well as a tool for teachers to evalua

This student self-assessment worksheet encourages students to reflect on their writing. It requires the student to isolate topic and concluding sentences in a written piece, as well as reflect on the quality of supporting details. Additionally, it elicits reflection on the editing process and what would help the student improve their writing the next time. It allows the teacher to evaluate a student's basic understanding of paragraph writing, and is very useful to review in a 1:1 conference w