Students are taken out of their comfort zone to experience a year in the country. Additional writing tasks offer great options for extra work. List things that are different between Mary Alice's world and the present. Translate two different expressions Mary Alice uses to describe her grandmother. Put events from the story in order as they happened with Mary Alice and Grandma on Halloween. Write a letter to Mary Alice's mother in her own words in an attempt to change her opinion of the grandmother. Students identify who the antagonist of the story is and defend their opinion. Create a travel brochure for Chicago, Illinois. Aligned to your State Standards, additional crossword, word search, comprehension quiz and answer key are also included. About the Novel: A Year Down Yonder is a Newbery Medal-winning story about a young girl who must spend a year living with her grandmother in the country. Mary Alice spent her childhood summers staying with her grandmother in a small country-town in Illinois. These summers were packed with enough surprises and drama to fill the double bill of any picture show. Now, Mary Alice is fifteen and must spend a whole year with her grandmother, away from her Chicago home. Over the course of the year, Mary Alice experiences a hurricane, fox-hunting by night, a late-night raid of a pecan tree and pumpkin patch, a huge snake in the attic, and a community rife with hardship and social pretenses. A Year Down Yonder is a hilariously funny and heart-warming novel.

Escape into the thrilling world of roller derby with Astrid, as she faces new experiences and the loss of a friend. The activities in this resource are geared for a mix of small group, partner and individual work, allowing teachers to determine student comprehension of the book’s content and vocabulary. Students make predictions about key plot points before reading the chapter. Answer multiple choice questions about Astrid’s time at roller derby camp. Determine the reason behind Astrid’s motives for lying to her mother. Identify synonyms of key vocabulary words found in the story. Imagine what it might be like for Nicole to be friends with Astrid. Put yourself in Astrid’s position and come up with a plan to apologize to Zoey. Describe and compare the different settings depicted in the story. Aligned to your State Standards and written to Bloom's Taxonomy, our worksheets incorporate a variety of scaffolding strategies along with additional crossword, word search, comprehension quiz and answer key. About the Novel: Roller Girl tells the story of 12-year-old Astrid, who discovers that people change as they grow older. Astrid is best friends with Nicole. They do everything together. One day, Astrid’s mother takes the girls to a roller derby bout. Astrid falls in love with the sport, and suggests she and Nicole sign up for the summer camp. However, Nicole doesn’t want to do roller derby; instead, she wants to go to ballet camp. Because of this, Astrid and Nicole start to drift apart. Astrid has high hopes for roller derby, but soon finds out that it’s a lot harder than she imagined. As she practices day and night, trying to get better, she learns valuable lessons on managing expectations and friendships. In the end, Astrid learns that there’s nothing wrong with friends growing and following their own path. Roller Girl is a graphic novel depicting the journey every young girl finds themselves while growing up.

Follow the journey of four students, whose lives are intertwined both personally and academically. Perfect for monitoring comprehension and discussing vocabulary. Students express what they already know about turtles prior to the reading. Explain what Ethan lost and gained at Julian's tea party. Complete a paragraph from the story with the missing words. Find synonyms to difficult words used in the book. Make a prediction of what will happen to the characters at the conclusion of the novel. Conduct an interview with one of the members of The Souls for the evening news. Complete a story map using details about the setting, characters, problem, plot, and resolution. Aligned to your State Standards, additional crossword, word search, comprehension quiz and answer key are also included. About the Novel: The View From Saturday is a Newbery Medal winning story about four gifted students and their life-altering journeys. Noah, Nadia, Ethan and Julian make up the four members of The Souls, a group of 6th grade students competing in the Academic Bowl. Led by Mrs. Olinski—their teacher who has become a paraplegic after a serious car crash—the group must face challenges that will shape their lives as they move through the competition. The story progresses through different perspectives given from each of the four members of The Souls. Each story, told in the first-person, describes an event that relates to a question they were asked in the Academic Bowl finals. Will The Souls successfully rise through the ranks to become state champions?

Reconnect with lost loved ones and discover the strength hidden within. This resource is engaging and fun for the students, leading to better comprehension of the novel. Put yourself in the Gaither sister’s shoes and imagine how you would react when facing your long-lost mother. Make inferences based on what is described in the text. Explore the importance of names and why people may change them. Designate statements about the summer camp as true or false. Find the word that does not belong in a series and explain why it does not fit. Plan a meal to serve to your family that is both delicious and nutritious. Track instances of flashbacks and foreshadowing used throughout the novel. Aligned to your State Standards and written to Bloom's Taxonomy, our worksheets incorporate a variety of scaffolding strategies along with additional crossword, word search, comprehension quiz and answer key. About the Novel: One Crazy Summer follows the adventures of the Gaither sisters as they travel to Oakland, California in the summer of 1968. Hoping to reconnect with the mother who abandoned them, Delphine, Vonetta and Fern fly to a strange new town on the other side of the country from where they call home. Scared and alone, the sisters meet a reluctant and secretive woman they refer to as Cecile. While the two youngest try their hardest to win Cecile’s affection, Delphine falls into her role as de facto mother in order to take care of her sisters. In doing so, she is able to slowly chip away at Cecile’s hard exterior and peek inside her inner workings. During their summer stay, Cecile sends the girls to a day camp run by the Black Panthers group. While there, the Gaither sisters meet new people and make new friends. They learn about what the Black Panthers are trying to accomplish and all the good they do for the community. By the end of the summer, the Gaither sisters manage to reconnect with their mother and make lifelong friends.

Strangers become a community in this heartwarming story about overcoming prejudices and finding a common ground. The vocabulary lists and quizzes create a complete resource that saves time while preparing these lessons. Students make predictions on how certain characters might be connected to each other. Analyze Leona's comments about her experience dealing with officials to characterize her feelings towards them. Answer multiple choice questions about Virgil's relationship with his father. Students explore Sae Young's actions when the thunderstorm fills the rain collection barrels and relates this back to the themes of the book. Imagine being Virgil's father and create a business plan for the baby lettuce idea. Detail how the setting of the book evolves with the characters in a transformation graphic organizer. Aligned to your State Standards and written to Bloom's Taxonomy, additional crossword, word search, comprehension quiz and answer key are also included. About the Novel: Seedfolks follows the intertwining stories of several neighbors as they break down barriers and form a community. A vacant lot in Cleveland, Ohio is not the perfect spot for Kim to plant her lima beans. It's too cold and there's not very much sun. She does this anyways in honor of her father. Little does she know that this action will intrigue the neighbors she knows only as strangers, and cause a ripple effect throughout the neighborhood. Each chapter follows a different neighbor and their personal journey that brought them to this vacant lot. People of varying ages, genders, races and religions come together with a shared goal of growing their item of choice. Some want to start a business, while others want to win back a lost love. The garden blooms from a segregated group of individual plots into a real community as peoples' guards are lowered and they begin to really know one another. When the season ends, only time will tell whether this new community will thrive.

In this State Standards-aligned Literature Kit™, we divide the novel by chapters or sections and feature reading comprehension and vocabulary questions. In every chapter, we include Before You Read and After You Read questions. The Before You Read activities prepare students for reading by setting a purpose for reading. They stimulate background knowledge and experience, and guide students to make connections between what they know and what they will learn. The After You Read activities check students' comprehension and extend their learning. Students are asked to give thoughtful consideration of the text through creative and evaluative short-answer questions and journal prompts. Also included are writing tasks, graphic organizers, comprehension quiz, test prep, word search, and crossword to further develop students' critical thinking and writing skills, and analysis of the text. About the Novel: Maniac Magee is a Newbery Medal winning story about a young homeless boy running through town and the different people he meets along the way. Orphaned at the age of three, Jeffrey Magee runs away from his Aunt and Uncle eight years later. He finds himself in Two Mills, Pennsylvania, where he realizes the town is split in half—the East End and the West End. Running his way through the town, Magee learns of the hatred and racism that separates the two sides. Along the way, he meets a wide range of interesting characters, and even develops a legend for himself, earning him the nickname "Maniac". He endures hardships while moving from place to place, eventually finding a home in a buffalo pen at the zoo. Maniac Magee is a brave story about racism and homelessness. All of our content is aligned to your State Standards and are written to Bloom's Taxonomy.

A dystopian future set underground brings to light the struggles that humanity will endure in order to survive. The variety of engaging activities can be easily broken up over several weeks to coordinate with assigned reading. Describe in detail the city of Ember, from how it looks to how it operates. Analyze the chapter titles and dissect what they could allude to. Explain what we as readers discover about Ember when Doon visits the library. Answer comprehension questions about events in the book surrounding Doon’s investigation in the tunnels. Create your own list of instructions that have been damaged and have a partner decipher what they are for. Plot the important moments or points of action from the story in a Pipeline Timeline graphic organizer. Aligned to your State Standards and written to Bloom's Taxonomy, additional crossword, word search, comprehension quiz and answer key are also included. About the Novel: The City of Ember tells the tale of a society living underground for hundreds of years and the two kids who must bring them into the light. Hundreds of years earlier, a group of people descended underground in hopes to save the human race from extinction. They had enough supplies and power to last them for over 200 years, at which point, instructions on how to return to the surface would be revealed. The only problem is, no one knows these instructions exist, and when they are revealed, they are destroyed. It’s up to Lina and Doon to decipher the few clues they have, locate the way out, and get this news back to their people. But it’s not that easy. In their attempts to find the way out, Lina and Doon stumble on a conspiracy that involves the Mayor and city guards. As such, they are now being hunted as fugitives. Their nearly impossible task just got harder. Now they must race against the clock to escape from Ember with no knowledge of where they are going, and how they can get back to save everyone else.