Interactive Reading Skills Lessons for Upper Elementary

Main idea, theme, text structures, and more! Whether you’re teaching nonfiction or fiction reading skills lessons for upper elementary students, just handing out worksheets and reading from the text can be boring! To help students really internalize reading skills lessons, it’s important to make them engaging! These digital Google Slides and Printable interactive reading skills lessons for upper elementary are designed to help your students learn while having fun!

Nonfiction Reading Skills Lessons

Quoting and Citing Accurately

When students are asked to answer questions about informational text, it’s important that they look to the reading to provide evidence to support their answer. They really need those important nonfiction reading skills. Too often, students will go from memory without referring back to the text. Students may also copy down information from the text word for word without citing their source.

The informational reading unit bundle includes reading skills lessons to help students directly quote and paraphrase with proper citations. In addition, they can learn how to summarize their evidence to provide a worthwhile answer.

Nonfiction Text Structures

Text structures and nonfiction reading skills are everything when it comes to informational text. Once your students can figure out the text structure, they can find the main idea and supporting details!

The informational reading unit bundle has reading skills lessons on four text structures:

• Cause and Effect
• Comparison
• Chronology
• Problem and Solution
• Text structures can be found by looking for key or clue words. For example, if your students are reading a cause and effect text, they may see words like “because”, “as a result of”, “cause”, and “effect”. Comparison (or contrast) texts have words like “similar”, “different”, “same”, “compare”, and “contrast”. Chronology uses time order words (“first”, “next”, “finally”) or dates and times. Finally, problem and solution texts may have words like “possibility”, “solve”, “in order that”, “leads to”. Once your students discover the text structure, they can formulate their main idea statement and supporting details that back up the main idea.

Fiction Reading Skills Lessons

Point of View

Point of View can change everything in a story! Think about it. When your students are reading a first person narrative, the only perspective they see is from the main character. Third person limited gives the students just some of the characters’ thoughts and feelings through an outside narrator. Third person omniscient gives every main character’s thoughts and feelings through an outside narrator.

Your students can figure out the point of view by looking at pronouns (I, We for first person or He, She, They for third person). Conversations about how the point of view affects the plot of the story can follow to make literature even more powerful and enjoyable for your readers.

The literature reading unit bundle has lessons on both point of view and point of view influence as reading skills lessons for upper elementary readers!

Figurative Language

Reading and writing pair so well together in the upper elementary ELA classroom. Fiction reading lessons are not complete without reading skills lessons over figurative language. Using figurative language in fiction and poetry help readers picture what’s happening in the story. Or use it to aid in character development, and formulate setting.

The literature reading unit bundle comes with two figurative language lessons to share with your upper elementary readers!

There is no need to spend hours building your own interactive reading skills lessons for upper elementary ELA. The nonfiction reading skills and fiction reading skills lessons (40 in all!) are included in the reading unit bundle.  These lessons will help your students engage and interact with informational and narrative texts!

All Literature and Non-Fiction Reading Lessons

Both CCSS units have all the literature and nonfiction reading lessons:

Literature Reading Skills Lessons Included:

1. Reading Complex Texts
2. Quoting and Citing Accurately
3. Inferences Lesson 1
4. Inferences Lesson 2
5. Theme Lesson 1
6. Theme Lesson 2
7. Summarizing
8. Character Traits Lesson 1
9. Character Traits Lesson 2
10. Plot
11. Vocabulary/Context Clues
12. Figurative Language Lesson 1
13. Figurative Language Lesson 2
14. Tone and Mood
15. Poem Structures
16. Drama Structures
17. Text Structures
18. Point of View
19. Point of View Influence
20. Visual Multimedia Elements
21. Audio and Multimedia Elements
22. Different Genres of Texts
23. Different Forms of Texts
24. Traditional Literature
25. Greek Mythology

Nonfiction Reading Skills Lessons Included:

1. Reading Complex Texts
2. Quoting and Citing Accurately (same lesson as literature)
3. Inferences Lesson 1
4. Inferences Lesson 2
5. Central Idea/Main Idea and Details
6. Summarizing Nonfiction Texts
7. Explain and Analyze: Individual, interactions, relationships, events, procedures, ideas, or concepts in a text).
8. Vocabulary/Context Clues (same lesson as literature)
9. Cause and Effect: Nonfiction Text Structures
10. Comparison: Nonfiction Text Structures
11. Chronology: Nonfiction Text Structures
12. Problem and Solution: Nonfiction Text Structures
13. Author’s Purpose
14. Firsthand and Secondhand Accounts
15. Charts, graphs, diagrams, time lines, animations, interactive elements
16. Argumentative and Persuasion Techniques
17. Analyzing Text Features
18. Integrating Information

All Literature and Non-Fiction Reading Freebie Lessons

Both the literature and nonfiction resources have a three-lesson print and digital freebie just for subscribers.

Click on the freebie image below to access your freebies.

RELATED LINKS: 

• Literature and Informational Reading Unit