Robert Kraus had a clear message to convey when he wrote Leo the Late Bloomer. Help your students determine the ways authors make their purpose for writing known to their readers with this effective lesson plan and collection of resources.

It won't take long for readers to discover connections between the main character and themselves in Leo the Late Bloomer. Use this text to help students to understand text-to-self, text-to-world, and text-to-text strategies with the accompanying lessons.

Leo the Late Bloomer is an ideal book for supporting readers who are learning to make inferences. Most students have experienced the feeling of lagging behind in one area of life or another, so they will be able to empathize with Leo and infer how he is feeling throughout his journey.

Retelling and summarizing is a key skill for early readers to master. Leo the Late Bloomer offers students ample opportunity to practice retelling important details about the text. The small number of characters and clear problem and solution will enable students to feel confident in their ability to retell the story.

Leo the Late Bloomer is an ideal anchor text for teaching beginner readers about the text structures used in picture books. Readers will learn how to identify description, cause and effect, and problem and solution text structures by participating in this focused mini lesson.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Leo the Late Bloomer by Robert Kraus as a springboard for instruction focused on inflectional endings.

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

This set of vocabulary development resources for Leo the Late Bloomer 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 Leo the Late Bloomer.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with Leo the Late Bloomer. 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.

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.

Read Leo the Late Bloomer 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 Leo the Late Bloomer. 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 Leo the Late Bloomer 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.