Use If I Built a School by Chris Van Dusen to strengthen your students' comprehension skills, build their vocabulary, and help them understand how words work.
This engaging resource set for If I Built a School by Chris Van Dusen invites students to explore a world built on creativity, imagination, and big dreams. Through a variety of comprehension activities, students will connect with Jack's wild ideas for the perfect school while practicing foundational reading skills.
With targeted strategy work in making connections, making inferences, and synthesizing, this bundle supports deeper understanding of both text and illustrations. Students will also enjoy a word work activity focused on long vowel rhymes—mirroring the rhythmic, rhyming structure of the story—and a creative opinion writing extension that asks students to dream up their own vision for a better school.
Whether it's imagining their own dream school, recalling fun field trips, or thinking about what makes learning exciting, If I Built a School is the perfect text for helping students make personal, text-to-text, and world connections. This resource packet encourages readers to see themselves in Jack's ideas and reflect on how their own school experiences shape their understanding of the story. Through thoughtful questions and hands-on activities, students will build reading comprehension by connecting their lives to the wild and wonderful world Jack creates.
From the flying pods to the dancing music class to the teacher's shocked face at the end, If I Built a School is filled with opportunities to infer character feelings, motivations, and big ideas. This resource packet invites students to combine what the text says with what the illustrations show to draw deeper meaning from Jack's vision. With scaffolded questions and supportive tools, students will practice reading between the lines to figure out what Jack really believes about how school should look, feel, and work.
At first, Jack's ideas might just seem silly or fun—but by the end of If I Built a School, students begin to see a bigger message about learning, imagination, and what school could be. This resource packet helps students track how Jack's ideas grow from page to page and encourages them to put together details from the beginning, middle, and end to form a big-picture understanding. With structured response prompts and meaningful discussion opportunities, students will synthesize Jack's vision into a thoughtful reflection on how school could be more creative, more exciting, and more student-centered.
This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use If I Built a School by Chris Van Dusen as a springboard for instruction focused on rhymes.
By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing how long vowel rhyming sounds are used inside of the text before engaging in both guided and independent practice with rhymes.
This set of vocabulary development resources for If I Built a School 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.
Understanding cause and effect is a key comprehension and language skill. The text structure of If I Built a School 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.
Read If I Built a School 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 a hands-on and interactive way.
This resource includes matching/sorting cards and a sorting mat for four cause and effect sentences in If I Built a School. 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.
In If I Built a School, Jack imagines a school full of incredible, out-of-this-world ideas. This activity invites students to dream up one amazing feature their own school would have. They will describe what it is, how it works, and why kids would love it, then bring their idea to life with an illustration. This creative writing and drawing activity encourages imagination, problem-solving, and expressive detail.
In this exuberant companion to If I Built a Car, a boy fantasizes about his dream school—from classroom to cafeteria to library to playground.
My school will amaze you. My school will astound. By far the most fabulous school to be found! Perfectly planned and impeccably clean. On a scale, 1 to 10, it's more like 15! And learning is fun in a place that's fun, too.
If Jack built a school, there would be hover desks and pop-up textbooks, skydiving wind tunnels and a trampoline basketball court in the gym, a robo-chef to serve lunch in the cafeteria, field trips to Mars, and a whole lot more. The inventive boy who described his ideal car and house in previous books is dreaming even bigger this time.
