3rd Grade · Reading · RL.3.1, RI.3.1
Children's Stories Lesson Plan for 3rd Grade
A ready-to-teach children's stories lesson for 3rd Grade, built around reading original stories and nonfiction closely, answering questions with details from the text, and reading plays aloud with attention to cast, scenes and stage directions. Print the plan, print the practice pages, and you are set.
Approximately 47 minutes
Learning objective
- Read "Priya's Fact Cards" and identify the main idea and key details
- Analyze the story's events and how the characters respond to Priya, who keeps a tin full of index cards recording odd facts she's collected, feels anxious when she's grouped with classmates who have teased her hobby for a class rainforest report project, worried the group work will go the same disappointing way as always
- Answer comprehension questions about plot, character, and story details
Materials
- The Carnival Decision
- Push, Pull, Force!
- The Attic Ship
- Keep Your Muscles Strong
- Pepper's Obstacle Course
- How to Make Ice Cream in a Bag
- Pencils, and whiteboard space for the modeled examples
Lesson steps
1. Build the background (5 min)
Connect children's stories to a book the class already finished. Prior knowledge is doing most of the work in comprehension, so spend the time here.
2. Read aloud and think aloud (I do) (10 min)
Read a short passage aloud and stop twice to narrate your own thinking about children's stories. Students are learning the move, not the answer.
3. Guided practice (we do) (12 min)
Read a second passage together. This time students find the evidence and you record it. Push every answer back to the text with "what words told you that?"
4. Independent practice (you do) (15 min)
Hand out "The Carnival Decision". Students read and answer on their own. Circulate and ask individuals to point to the line in the text that supports their answer.
5. Share and close (5 min)
Two or three students share an answer and the evidence behind it. Restate children's stories one final time in the students' own words, not yours.
Check for understanding
Ask each student to point to the evidence in the text for one of their answers. A student who has the right answer but cannot find the line has not yet learned children's stories.
Differentiation
Extra support. Students who stall: pull them into a small group and rebuild children's stories with concrete materials or a simpler text before asking for the written work again. Do not send the page home as homework, it will just rehearse the misunderstanding.
Extension. Students who finish early: ask them to write their own children's stories problem for a partner to solve, then check the partner's work. Creating a problem is harder than solving one and it surfaces whether they really understand children's stories.
Skills covered in this lesson
Priya's Fact Cards · The Carnival Decision · Pepper's Obstacle Course · The Attic Ship · Naomi and the Case of the Missing Retainer · The Kickball Argument · How Animals Talk Without Words · The Sky's Water Cycle · How to Make Ice Cream in a Bag · Amazing Landforms of Earth · Life Cycles: From Egg to Adult · Push, Pull, Force!
