The ability to identify main characters, big problems, and major events are key to a reader's ability to determine importance while reading. Use this mini lesson and set of student resources to support your students as they identify Little Blue Truck's biggest problem, which characters are most important to the story, and why some events are more important than others.

Illustrator, Jill McElmurry, makes it easy for readers to infer key story elements including setting and character traits. Use the page by page guide included with this mini lesson to teach students how to use illustrations to make important inferences while reading.

Young readers love to hate the dump truck in this story. With his pushy nature and self-important attitude, Dump Truck has a lot to learn. Luckily Little Blue Truck and his animal friends are able to teach him an important lesson. Use this synthesizing mini lesson to help readers track the ways a character can change over the course of a text.

Little Blue Truck is a shining example of a simple story told through a variety of text structures. Use this understanding text structure mini lesson to teach beginning readers about description, sequence, problem and solution, compare and contrast, and cause and effect.

Visualizing is an important strategy for first-grade readers to master. Use this mini lesson and set of student resources to teach students how to notice the way an author uses words to help her readers create mental images.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Little Blue Truck by Alice Schertle as a springboard for instruction focused on onomatopoeias.

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

This set of vocabulary development resources for Little Blue Truck 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 Little Blue Truck.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with LittleBlue Truck. 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 Little Blue Truck 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 Little Blue Truck. 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 Little Blue Truck 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.