This mini lesson will guide students through how to ask questions before, during, and after reading a nonfiction text. Asking questions with The Brain: All about Our Nervous System and More! by Seymour Simon helps to ensure that the reader is understanding the scientific information presented by the author.

The brain and nervous system are very complex. With the presentation of a large amount of scientific information, students will need to pay attention to vocabulary words and key facts to determine what is important for them to remember.

The Brain: All about Our Nervous System and More! is an ideal anchor text to use to build retelling and summarizing skills. Students will gain valuable practice using their own words to remember the important information presented in a nonfiction text.

In order for readers to more fully understand the information presented in The Brain: All about Our Nervous System and More!, they must learn how to add the new information to what they already know about the brain. Follow this synthesizing mini lesson to teach readers how to be metacognitive about the information they learn while reading this nonfiction text.

Author Seymour Simon incorporates a variety of text structures into The Brain: All about Our Nervous System and More! Use this mini lesson and set of student resources to help readers name and notice the key text structures used to explain the complex process of the brain.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use The Brain: All about Our Nervous System and More! by Seymour Simon as a springboard for instruction focused on affixes.

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

This set of vocabulary development resources for The Brain: All about Our Nervous System and More! 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 Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with The Brain: All about Our Nervous System and More! 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 The Brain: All about Our Nervous System and More! 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 The Brain: All about Our Nervous System and More!. 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 The Brain: All about Our Nervous System and More! 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.