Teaching poetry is a great way to introduce literary elements and test reading comprehension! Read and Understand Poetry provides all the materials you need to successfully teach poetry to your students! The units included in the book provide background information, vocabulary, elements of poetry, the poem itself, and comprehension activities. Keep reading for a free download of a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poetry unit from the book!

About the Poets
This unit from the book presents a short biography of each of the poets featured in the workbook. Poets like Lewis Carroll, Henry Livingston Jr., William Shakespeare, and Robert Louis Stevenson are all featured within their own units. This unit also includes a cover sheet, so students can create their own poetry anthology! The variety of poets provided in the book give a well-rounded view of different types of poems, like haikus, sonnets, and more!

Read and Understand Poetry grades 1-2

“Ladybug, Ladybug” by John Himmelman
This unit pairs the rhyming poem with poetry element lessons about innovation and personification. The unit encourages students to compare real and imaginary ladybugs, like the poem. Following the poem is comprehension questions about language used, content of the poem, and figurative language so students fully understand the poem!

“July” by Lana Krumwiede
“July” recalls the festivities of the fourth of July using imagery! Students will talk about their own favorite fourth of July memories before reading the poem, and learn about the involved literary devices, like onomatopoeia and internal rhyming. After reading the poem, students will practice comprehension questions and activities.

“Limerick Collection” by Edward Lear
Teach your students about limericks, a different type of poetry, with this unit! Students will learn new vocabulary before they read the poem, and then learn about the limerick form of poetry and its elements, like hyperbole! Students will also get a chance to write their own limerick as part of the unit comprehension!

“The Swing” by Robert Louis Stevenson
This poem is written by famous poet, RLS! Students will learn about rhyme scheme and hyperbole in this unit, and will practice using imagery by describing with great detail the experience of swinging.

“Concrete Poem” by Beverly McLoughland
Concrete poems are another type of new poem for students to learn about! This concrete poem, which describes a child going down a slide, is written in an illustration. Students will learn about concrete poems, diction, and alliteration in this unit, and then will get to practice writing their own concrete shape poems!

Read and Understand Poetry grades 3-4

“A Visit from St. Nicholas”
This unit focuses on the classic Christmas poem, whose authorship has been contested for years. This unit focuses on the use of similes in poetry, and includes comprehension activities like multiple choice, sequencing, and a simile writing activity. The unit also teaches about ballad poetry, this poem being a great example of a ballad!

“The Walrus and the Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll
This poem, written by the famous author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is paired with teaching about rhyming verse, dialogue used in poems, and Carroll’s use of nonsensical poetry. The unit provides the background, poem, and comprehension questions and short answer questions.

FREE Download of “Hiawatha’s Childhood” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
This narrative poem tells the story of a Native American tribal leader, and also teaches about using contractions to obtain the correct syllables. It also includes lots of vocabulary to help students understand the poem better. The reading comprehension section asks questions about the poem and then asks students to identify what happened in each stanza. Get the free download here!

“My Father’s Eyes” by Sonia Sanchez
This haiku poem features a connection with heritage, and is the center of this unit that teaches about haiku and the use of capitalization in poetry. The haiku also features a fantastic illustration, to aid with understanding the poem, and reading comprehension questions about ancestry.

“Who Has Seen the Wind?” by Christina Rosettei
This poem about nature’s mysteries teaches students about personification and repetition, two essential literary devices used in poetry. This unit features the short poem, background information, teaching materials, and reading comprehension questions. It also features an activity where students can write their own poem using repetition and personification.

Read and Understand Poetry grades 5-6

“Seeds” by Javaka Steptoe
This metaphorical poem introduces students to new vocabulary and new poetry elements, like metaphors, similes, and enjambment. After, students will answer comprehension questions, practice identifying similes and metaphors, matching idioms with their meaning, and identifying enjambment in the poem.

“Youth, do I adore thee” by William Shakespeare
Challenge students with a classic Shakespeare lyric poem, which introduces new vocabulary words to students and reinforces metaphors and similes. As part of comprehension, students will practice matching antonyms, writing synonyms, and identifying similes and metaphors.

“Haiku Collection” by assorted authors
Introduce the haiku form to your students with this unit! The unit gives students four nature-based haikus to read, paired with activities to help students understand the haiku form and the importance of detail in poetry. Along with reading comprehension questions, students will practice splitting up syllables in lines of poetry.

“The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Before reading this famous poem, students will read background information about Tennyson’s inspiration for this work. Then they will learn new vocabulary from the poem before reading it. After, students will learn about dactylic meter and practice identifying the meter pattern along with other comprehension questions.

“You Are Old, Father William” by Lewis Carroll
In this unit, students will be introduced to dialogue used in poetry. They’ll learn some unfamiliar vocabulary used in the poem before reading it, and after they’ll learn about dialogue and parody as poetic elements. Paired with reading comprehension questions, students will practice matching synonyms, rhyming words, and identifying elements from the poem.

All of these units and more are featured in Read and Understand, available here on Evan-Moor.com. This workbook is also made for other grade levels, and all feature a similar format that encourages students to not just read poetry, but understand the elements that make a great poem!

Christine Wooler has experience working with children as a youth soccer coach and summer camp counselor. She is currently studying English Literature and journalism in college. She enjoys exploring educational topics that help students have fun while learning.

Freshen up your writing activities with some fun spring writing prompts, such as story starters, letters to Mother Nature, and free writing prompts. This time of year makes everyone antsy as summer gets closer, but there’s still plenty of school left, and plenty of time to include writing in your lesson plans!

Spring Writing Prompts

• Pretend you’re a bee flying over a flower field. Describe the feeling of springtime and why it is so important to bees.
• Write a poem about spring.
• Dear Mother Nature: Write a letter thanking Mother Nature for spring and describe your favorite things about the season.
• Write a persuasive letter to your teacher about having class outside more.
• Plan a springtime picnic. Plan out the place, time, food, and games! Make a list of what you’ll need.
• Imagine you find a large Easter egg at the park. Where did it come from? Who does it belong to? What’s inside of it?
• Pretend you are one of the Easter Bunny’s helpers. What do you have to do to prepare for Easter? Do you deliver eggs?
• Invent a new ice cream flavor.
• Write about April showers. What do you like about the rain? What don’t you like?
• It’s the Great Egg Hunt—kids from all different schools gather for this event once a year. The countdown starts: 3…2…1…GO!
• Pretend you have to create a bouquet, but it can’t be made out of flowers. What do you make it out of? Who is it for?
• Write about your favorite flower.

Story Starters

• I planted a little seedling yesterday. When I looked out the window this morning, I saw…
• Find a beautiful or interesting tree. Write a description of the tree so someone else can imagine what it looks like.
• We played the funniest April Fools’ trick on my parents…
• If you could change anything about our world to save the Earth, what would it be?
• I woke up on Easter morning to discover I had been turned into…
• I knew there were leprechauns in Ireland, but I never expected to see one in…
• My dad always gardens in the spring. This year he planted some unusual plants…
• I caught a leprechaun! Now what?
• This time I decided to follow the rainbow, and I found the treasure…
• Pretend you’re a baby bird about to take your first flight! Describe the experience.

It’s important to keep students writing; even short writing activities each day can greatly improve their writing fluency! Keep prompts open-ended so students can use their imagination and engage in the activities. Encourage freewriting where students don’t have to worry about self-editing or spelling as they go, but instead just develop their narrative and persuasive writing fluency.

Check out Write Every Day: April and Write Every Day: March units from the Giant Write Every Day activity book. These units come with 25 quick-write prompts, reproducibles, and 15 story starters to provide your classroom with enough material to keep students busy during those rainy days. Giant Write Every Day provides writing lessons and creative prompts for each month of the year.

Christine Wooler has experience working with children as a youth soccer coach and summer camp counselor. She is currently studying English Literature and journalism in college. She enjoys exploring educational topics that help students have fun while learning.

Active participation has long been held as one of the greatest teaching strategies to engage students and have them retain their understanding of concepts learned. Grounded in active learning, the 5E model of learning science is built around student-led inquiry and encourages students to ask questions, test theories, and develop new ideas of their own. This constructivist learning model was developed in 1987 by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study and promotes collaborative and active learning. The 5E model places inquiry-based learning on the forefront, allowing students to gain a deeper understanding of the material by asking questions that interest them.

The 5 Es are:

Engage
Explore
Explain
Evaluate
Extend

Learn more about the 5E science learning model from Evan-Moor’s Science Lessons and Investigations for grades 1–6. This learning model will have students work together to study science concepts by asking questions, observing ideas in action, analyzing data, and developing conclusions.

Science Lessons and Investigations Grade 3 Forces and Motion

One of the concepts that this model tackles in Science Lessons and Investigations is Forces and Motion, which involves changes in movement. The lesson involves three main characteristics of the concept:

• Each force acts on one particular object and has both strength and a direction.
• Forces can cause changes in the object’s speed or direction of motion.
• Objects at rest have multiple forces acting on them that cancel each other out.

Engage

Engage is the first of the five Es, and engages students in the concept (Forces and Motion) by relating it to past lessons and experiences. In this phase of learning, students will discuss and ask questions to spark interest. This lesson discusses spinning tops as a change in movement and forces, including questions that further inquiry of the concept.

• Can a top stand up on its own?
• What other items spin?

This part of the lesson will engage students in asking question about forces and motion and spark their interest before they begin to study the science theory.

Explore

The second E is Explore, where students take the concepts they discussed during engagement and put it into practice with a hands-on activity. To explore forces and motion, students will conduct an experiment using a spinning top. Students will collect data about how long the top can spin, make observations about the top before, during, and after spinning, and record their findings.

The Explore section of this lesson comes with a second activity, where students will design a maze on construction paper and then guide a marble through the maze without touching it! They will have to do so using straws and/or by gently lifting the edges of the paper. Students will answer questions, make observations, and record findings. This activity allows students to formulate questions as they actively participate in exploring it.

Explain

After successfully completing the explore portion, students move onto the Explainphase, the third E. Students will gain a deeper understanding of what they just learned by reading selections, seeing real-life visuals, and learning vocabulary (words like gravity, friction, and balanced forces). Here, students will read a short excerpt about how forces act in the world and use their new vocabulary to gain context of the spinning top and marble experiment concepts.

Evaluate

The fourth E is Evaluate. In this stage, students will complete comprehension activities to show what they have learned and apply it to other situations. In the forces and motion activity, students fill in the blanks using vocabulary, answer whether a picture is showing “pulling” or “pushing” forces, and identify balanced forces on a playground. This part of the teaching model is where students will start identifying the concepts they’ve learned outside of the classroom and apply them to real-life scenarios.

Extend

The fifth and final E is Extend. Students respond to writing prompts and complete hands-on activities. These activities extend students’ learning from classroom experiences into the real world by applying concepts and vocabulary to their everyday lives. These lessons ask students to reflect on their experience by:

• Drawing a spinning top.
• Writing a paragraph imagining they were a skydiver being affected by forces.
• Creating a project.

The lesson supplies two project possibilities:

• Create your own spinning top from household items.
• Create a video dictionary by taking photos or videos of forces being used on the playground or at home. This project will extend the concepts into application.

The 5E teaching model is outlined clearly in Evan-Moor’s Science Lessons and Investigations activity book, available for grades 1–6.

Other unit topics in grade three include lessons from life, earth, and physical sciences, some of which include:

• Plant and Animal Life Cycles
• Nature and Nurture: Inheritance of Traits
• Group Social Behavior
• Fossils of Ancestors
• Weather, Climate, and Natural Hazards
• Magnetic Forces

For more forces and motion experiments, try this STEM Challenge: Egg Carrier (Physical Science) for grade 3!

Discover more hands-on, investigative science lessons from Evan-Moor’s Science Lessons and Investigations series (grades 1–6).

Christine Wooler has experience working with children as a youth soccer coach and summer camp counselor. She is currently studying English Literature and journalism in college. She enjoys exploring educational topics that help students have fun while learning.

The Percy Jackson book series has seized elementary readers everywhere, and it is the perfect opportunity to incorporate Greek and Roman mythology into your history lessons! The books follow a young protagonist, Percy, who finds out that the world of Greek mythology is real and that he’s at the center of it; he’s a demigod, half mortal, half Greek god. And the hands-on series of books by Evan-Moor, Literature Pockets: Greek and Roman Myths (grades 4–6), educates young readers about Greek mythology and history and provides a gateway into the history of the ancient world.

Supplement your social studies lessons with this unit from Literature Pockets: Greek and Roman Myths to include exciting myths like Perseus and the Gorgons and Pandora’s Jar that students will love learning about! These engaging lessons and activities will bring Percy Jackson to life!

Pocket 2: Pandora’s Jar

Learn all about the myth of Pandora’s jar, a classic tale of a character who let her curiosity get the best of her. After reading the myth, the students will design their very own Greek-style vase, learn vocabulary and comprehension, and write their own short story about a curious character and a sealed container. Get this individual unit on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Pocket 3: Perseus and the Gorgons

This pocket presents the Greek myth of the great hero Perseus (the book’s Percy Jackson was named after him) as he takes on the evil gorgon, Medusa, who turns people to stone with one look. The unit includes activities like making an illustrated mini book, creating a 3D Medusa, writing a news article about Perseus’s victory, and a vocabulary and comprehension activity page. Find this individual unit on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Pocket 5: The Race for Atalanta

This unit includes the myth of Melanion, who ran a race to win the heart of his true love, princess Atalanta, and won with the help of the Greek goddess Aphrodite. After students read the myth, they’ll complete activities like illustrating the victory scene, creating a mini book about Greek sports, and creating a moveable portrait of Melanion holding his gift from Aphrodite. The unit also includes a comprehensive vocabulary page. Get this unit here, on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Pocket 6: Persephone and the Seasons

A lot of Greek myths help explain natural phenomena; for example, the Greek myth of Persephone explains why we have four seasons and why they are so different. The unit includes a story plot flowchart, a character map, a puppet show activity where students will write, create, and perform a show about the myth, and a vocabulary page. This unit is individually available on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Percy Jackson–Themed Activities and Projects

Character Cereal Box Project

This hands-on book report project focuses on one character from a book and can be expanded for any book report. Students will pick one character from Percy Jackson or the Greek myths. It could be a human character, a Greek god, or anything in between. After they select a character, each student will create a cereal brand based on that character.

 Each student will redecorate a cereal box with pictures, slogans, and “nutritional facts.” Instruct students to write a summary of the book or myth on the back of the cereal box, the nutritional facts on one side, a list of important characters on the other, and their title and illustrations on the front! They can even advertise a “prize” inside that relates to the book or character, like a toy sword inside Percy-Os!

Directions:

1.Write a summary of the book or myth on the back of the cereal box.

2. Create nutritional facts on one side of the box. Facts should relate to the character.

3. Write a list on the other side of the box of the character’s personality traits, powers, and other relevant information.

For example:
Percy-Os! A little bit of hero to start your morning off right! Nutritional facts: 30 g of heroism, 20 g of loyalty, 10 g of sarcasm, 20 g of bravery, 5 g of saltwater, 10 g of athleticism, and 3 drops of blue artificial coloring.

4. Decorate the front of the cereal box with a title and illustrations.

Supplies Needed:

1. One cereal box per student
2. Colored construction paper
3. Scissors, glue, markers, pens

Creative Writing Prompts

Instruct your students to imagine that they live in the Percy Jackson universe. Make the prompt as open-ended as possible, so the students can use their imagination to place themselves inside the world of Greek gods and heroes. Listed below are a few examples:

• Which character would they be? Would they be a Greek god? A demigod hero?
• What monster are they facing?
• Maybe your students want to pretend they’re campers at Camp Half-Blood…which cabin do they belong to? Are they going to win Capture the Flag?

Create-a-Monster Art Project

Engage your students in Greek mythology by having them create their own monster! They can mix and match traits from the monsters they’ve read about, or make their own from scratch. Have your students draw their monster on a piece of paper and label its abilities (e.g., acid breath, four heads, spiked tail, etc.).

To further this activity, have your students write about how this monster gets defeated and by which hero. It can be a hero from myths, like Hercules, or their very own hero from the activity above. No monster is too fearsome for your classroom heroes!

Use these lessons and activities to turn your classroom into a mini Greek villa! The Percy Jackson series is a successful gateway into Greek history, and will keep students engaged and fascinated. Check out Rick Riordan’s other successful series, which dive into the mythological adventures of Roman demigods, Egyptian descendants, and Norse heroes.

Discover more history pockets:

History Pockets: Ancient Rome grades 4–6

History Pockets: Ancient Egypt grades 4–6

History Pockets: Ancient Civilizations grades 1–3

Christine Wooler has experience working with children as a youth soccer coach and summer camp counselor. She is currently studying English Literature and journalism in college. She enjoys exploring educational topics that help students have fun while learning.