Chrysanthemum is a character young children will easily connect with. They will draw upon their own experiences to successfully identify the author's broader reason for writing this story.

At this age, most children have experienced bullying in one way or another. As a result, younger readers will easily identify with the main character to make text-to-self connections while reading. There are also opportunities to make text-to-text and even text-to-world connections.

In Chrysanthemum, the author uses a predictable story structure to move the reader through the text. This paired with the familiar themes of bullying and self-confidence make this an excellent lesson plan for practicing making predictions.

Students will be able to clearly identify the events, characters, and the problem and solution in this story. You can also break the book into scenes, which each have their own cause and effect sequence, and then prompt beginning readers to retell and summarize individual scenes.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes as a springboard for instruction focused on suffixes.

By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing how suffix-lyis used inside of the text before engaging in both guided and independent practice with suffix -ly.

This set of vocabulary development resources for Chrysanthemum highlights the words that are most important for students to know and understand while reading the book.  Through engaging in fun word games, matching words to definitions and pictures, and practicing how to categorize words, students will develop the vocabulary necessary to comprehend this story and many others.

Use this Common Core aligned comprehension assessment to evaluate students' comprehension of Chrysanthemum.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with Chrysanthemum. Track meaning, structure, and visual accuracy using the first 100 words of the text to determine whether or not this book is a good fit for the readers in your classroom.

Read Chrysanthemum then have some fun matching cause and effect sentences from the book. By using these cause and effect cards, students will demonstrate both their comprehension of the text and their understanding of cause and effect relationships in hands-on and interactive way.

This resource includes matching/sorting cards and a sorting mat for four cause and effect sentences in Chrysanthemum. Each cause card is marked with a square and each effect card is marked with a circle, making it easy to support students who struggle with matching cause and effect relationships.

Understanding cause and effect is a key comprehension and language skill. The text structure of Chrysanthemum includes several examples of cause and effect relationships, making it easy to use as a springboard for modeling or independent practice.

This simple resource includes four sentence stems. Each sentence stem presents an effect. Students will use what they know about the book to fill in the cause of the effect.

The BookPagez extension activities are a great way to push student engagement beyond the pages of the text. Try using this activity with early finishers, with students who show a deeper connection with the text, or as a center activity.