Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings is a natural choice for an asking questions mini lesson because most students have had some experiences with ducks. Curiosity and sense of wonder are heightened when students combine their prior knowledge with this classic story.

Use this set of resources to guide students as they work on determining what details in Make Way for Ducklings are most important. When students focus on the most important details of the story, they will learn more about the character's feelings and actions and why the setting is so important to Mrs. Mallard.

Making predictions while reading Make Way for Ducklings helps students use the clues that author Robert McCloskey included to think about what might come next. This mini lesson shows students where to stop and think about the story.

Students might think that Mrs. Mallard is being "picky" about where she wants to live, but what they don't know is that she is about to be a Mom to eight little ducklings. When students learn more about a character while reading, and they use that information to impact their thinking, they are synthesizing!

Author Robert McCloskey uses sequence, cause and effect, problem and solution, and description to help tell the story in Make Way for Ducklings. Help your students focus on how the text is organized with this understanding text structure mini lesson.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey as a springboard for instruction focused on diphthongs.

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

This set of vocabulary development resources for Make Way for Ducklings 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 Make Way for Ducklings.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with Make Way for Ducklings. 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.

Understanding cause and effect is a key comprehension and language skill. The text structure of Make Way for Ducklings 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.

Read Make Way for Ducklings 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 Make Way for Ducklings. 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.