The author of Ira Sleeps Over presents a clear message about friendship and the importance of being yourself. Beginner readers will be able to identify these messages early in the book, which will allow them to practice supporting the author's message with evidence from the rest of the text.

This book is an excellent choice for supporting lessons and discussions about making connections, especially text-to-self connections. Most readers at this level will have experience spending a night away from home. When they draw upon their own experiences, they will better understand Ira's conflict over bringing his teddy bear to a sleep over.

Ira Sleeps Over is a smart choice for readers who need practice making predictions. As they apply their own experiences and connections to the text, students will practice making logical predictions about the feelings and decisions of the main characters in this story.

Ira Sleeps Over is an effective anchor text for a lesson on retelling. In order to fully comprehend this story, readers will need to determine which characters are most important based on how they affect the plot. Also, with a lot of dialogue mixed in with the description of events, students will practice how to use dialogue to summarize a story.

Use this lesson plan to help students synthesize character development stories in order to understand how characters and their assessments of those characters can change as they read the text.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Ira Sleeps Over by Bernard Waber as a springboard for instruction focused on hard and soft g sounds.

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

This set of vocabulary development resources for Ira Sleeps Over 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 Ira Sleeps Over.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with Ira Sleeps Over. 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 Ira Sleeps Over 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 Ira Sleeps Over. 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 Ira Sleeps Over 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.