Students can easily connect with the subject matter that author Giles Andreae tackles in Giraffes Can't Dance (teasing). This connection leads to the students asking deeper, more meaningful questions.

Readers will have fun using the determining importance strategy to sort through the important and not-so-important details in the text. Practicing this strategy will help readers gain confidence in their ability to focus on the key details while reading.

Will Gerald learn to dance? Will the animals stop teasing Gerald? Encourage your students to make sensible predictions while reading by using their prior knowledge and the clues from the pictures and text.

Use this synthesizing lesson plan to help readers notice how the characters' actions and feelings change throughout the story. Students will also be challenged to self-reflect and "think about their thinking" (metacognition).

Giraffes Can't Dance by Giles Andreae offers practice with a variety of text structures. Readers will gain experience using description, sequencing, cause and effect, problem and solution, and comparing and contrasting to become a stronger reader.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Giraffes Can't Dance by Giles Andreae as a springboard for instruction focused on contractions.

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

This set of vocabulary development resources for Giraffes Can't Dance 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 Giraffes Can't Dance.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with Giraffes Can't Dance. 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 Giraffes Can't Dance 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 Giraffes Can't Dance. 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 Giraffes Can't Dance 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.