Check Out Our New Teacher Guides!

The Books That Grow content team has been working diligently to produce Common Core-aligned teacher guides for all of our 135 (and growing) books. So far, we have over twenty five guides, covering pieces such as What to The Slave is The Fourth of July?, by Frederick Douglass, The Masque of The Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe, our version of the Greek myth Arachne, our biography of Albert Einstein, and many more.

Each guide is made up of the following seven sections.

Things To Know features a short summary of the book and a discussion of its historical, literary or curricular context.

Before Reading provides teachers with quick-write and discussion questions they can use to prime students to think about the author’s intentions, and to get them thinking about themes soon to be encountered in the work.

During Reading suggests questions teachers can use to direct students’ attention to important structural elements of the text, encourage students to hone their close reading abilities, and to consider the significance of style elements such as tone and word choice.

After Reading provides teachers with discussion questions and essay and project prompts designed to help students consolidate their understanding of the text by encouraging them to think of overarching patterns, and to make big-picture takeaways.  

Connections In Text suggests other texts in the Books That Grow library that teachers may want to pair with the current text. Based upon the learning principle of elaborative processing,   this practice helps students build domain knowledge and reinforces skills across different works.

Further Readings suggests supplemental websites for both teachers and students.

Domain and Target Vocabulary highlights important domain-specific vocabulary and challenging grade-level appropriate vocabulary contained within the book. Teachers can use this information to pre-teach key vocabulary, highlight words during reading, or build vocabulary learned in context into other exercises.

Please check out the full list of titles and guides on our website and let us know what you think! If there’s a piece that you would like to teach soon that does not yet have a guide, drop us an email and we’ll get on it right away.