A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams is brimming with messages, including those about persistence, goal setting, family values, and strong work ethic. Help students identify the author's purpose with this lesson plan and set of teaching resources. The text-specific questions will help readers think deeply about the characters, the events, and the messages in the story in order to understand why the author wrote the book.

Pair this making inferences lesson plan and set of teaching resources with this emotional tale of a family who loses their belongings in a fire. The author's tender storytelling will inspire students to draw upon their feelings in order to infer what the characters in A Chair for My Mother might be feeling or thinking in response to tragedy.

This minilesson and set of teaching resources will support students as they work to explore a variety of text structures in A Chair for My Mother. The page-specific prompts included in the minilesson guide readers to notice how the author uses sequencing, description, cause and effect, and problem and solution to tell the story.

The strong descriptive language in A Chair for My Mother makes it the perfect choice for a minilesson focused on visualizing. Use the text-dependent questions included in this set of teaching resources to guide students through the text, make meaningful mental images, and deepen their comprehension of this award-winning story.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams as a springboard for instruction focused on prepositions and prepositional phrases.

By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing how parts of speech are used inside of the text before engaging in both guided and independent practice with prepositions.