City Green is a story that works to convey many themes and messages. In this lesson plan, students will work through identifying messages on community involvement, the challenges and triumphs of working with others, and more.

City Green offers a unique opportunity for all students to connect with a world unlike their own. Students with planting and gardening experience will make text-to-self connections as they reflect on the anticipation of waiting for life to grow. Text-to-world connections will also be made as they learn more about living in an urban city center. Children who live in apartments or other areas where gardening is less commonplace can connect the story to their own neighborhood landscapes and what it might be like to have a garden of their own.

Old Man Hammer, the antagonist in City Green, is "hard as nails," and main character Marcy discovers some of the reasons why he's so mean and nasty. Through these discoveries, children will practice using text and illustrations to infer what happened to Old Man Hammer that makes him so gruff.

The distinct characters and clear problem and solution in City Green make this lesson plan perfect for practicing retelling. With a conventional linear progression, young readers will easily be able to identify the important events in this story.

The vivid language used in City Green to describe a littered vacant lot turned beautiful community garden will support readers who need additional practice with mental imagery. With this lesson plan, readers will learn how to identify specific words in the text to help them visualize basic nouns and human emotion.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use City Green by Dyanne DiSalvo-Ryan as a springboard for instruction focused on vowels.

By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing how long /a/ sound is used inside of the text before engaging in both guided and independent practice with long /a/ sound.

This set of vocabulary development resources for City Green 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 City Green.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with City Green. 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 City Green 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 City Green. 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 City Green 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.