When paired with this asking questions resource set, John Henry provides an opportunity for students to question events that happen within the story. Use the included set of text-based questions to help readers examine their questions to determine which events in the story are an exaggeration of real life.

The story of John Henry presents readers with a variety of messages. Use this mini lesson and set of activities support students as they examine the details of the story to draw conclusions about the author's message.

Challenge students to make connections between the ballad of John Henry and their prior knowledge or tall tales, legendary characters, and real-world events with this making connections resource set.

John Henry is an ideal anchor text for a mini lesson focused on making inferences. Through using this Caldecott Honor book with this resource set students will have the opportunity to make inferences about character motivation and word choice.

Synthesizing text can be a difficult strategy for students to master. Use this mini lesson and set of resources to teach readers how to examine John Henry actions in the story in order to draw conclusions about his character.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use John Henry by Julius Lester as a springboard for instruction focused on suffixes.

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

This set of vocabulary development resources for John Henry 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 John Henry.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with John Henry. 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 John Henry 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 John Henry. 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 John Henry 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.