Use this determining importance lesson plan and set of resources to help readers as important characters, events, and emotions are described throughout the story.

If you're looking for the perfect book to pair with a lesson on making predictions, look no further. As the main character unexpectedly joins a band of pirates, learns their ways, endures a storm, and ultimately decides whether to remain a pirate forever or return home, readers have many opportunities to practice making and validating their predictions about the characters' actions.

How I Became a Pirate is a good selection for readers who are building their retelling and summarizing skills to improve their comprehension. The unique story-within-a-story text structure used in this book requires students to pay close attention to specific details and text structures to correctly retell and summarize.

With a story-within-a-story format and other structures presented like cause/effect, How I Became a Pirate is terrific practice for students who are learning to understand how different text structures affect their understanding.

Students will have a riot practicing visualizing with How I Became a Pirate. The rich illustrations, fantastic event descriptions and nonstop action make it easy to create a movie in your mind while reading this book.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use How I Became a Pirate by Melinda Long as a springboard for instruction focused on vowels.

By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing how long "e" vowel teams (-ee and -ea) are used inside of the text before engaging in both guided and independent practice with long vowel "e" words.

This set of vocabulary development resources for How I Became a Pirate 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 How I Became a Pirate.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with How I Became a Pirate. 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 How I Became a Pirate 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 How I Became a Pirate. 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 How I Became a Pirate 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.