The whimsical portrayal of a worm and his family written in diary format will inspire a natural sense of curiosity while reading. Your lesson on asking questions about the characters and the events in the book to deepen comprehension will be practically automatic.

Diary of a Worm makes it easy—and funny—for readers to connect their daily activities and experiences to those of an earthworm and his friends and family.

Are you looking for a fun, engaging lesson plan to support readers as they learn to make inferences while reading? Diary of a Worm will encourage children to draw upon their own daily experiences to understand how a fictitious worm might be feeling based on the events that the worm writes about in the pages of his diary.

This is a uniquely perfect lesson plan for teaching students how to read and comprehend different text structures. The author uses a non-traditional diary format to relate the story of a worm and the life he leads right beneath our feet. Readers will also learn how to navigate speech bubbles in illustrations to deepen their reading experience.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Diary of a Worm by Doreen Cronin as a springboard for instruction focused on digraphs.

By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing how long vowel digraphs (ai, ea, ei, oa, ay, ia, ie) are used inside of the text before engaging in both guided and independent practice with long vowel digraphs.

This set of vocabulary development resources for Diary of a Worm 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 Diary of a Worm.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with Diary of a Worm. 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 Diary of a Worm 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 Diary of a Worm. 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 Diary of a Worm 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.