Use The Recess Queen by Alexis O'Neill to strengthen your students' comprehension skills, build their vocabulary, and help them understand how words work.
The Recess Queen by Alexis O'Neill is a lively and empowering story that teaches children about kindness, inclusion, and standing up to bullying. With dynamic illustrations and rhythmic text, this book is a wonderful resource for developing key comprehension strategies. This resource package includes activities focused on identifying past tense verbs with -ed and engaging extension activities that help students connect the story's themes to their own lives. These activities ensure that students build their literacy skills while fostering empathy.
The Recess Queen's vibrant storytelling and important message make it ideal for exploring the author's purpose. Students will analyze how Alexis O'Neill uses humor, exaggerated characters, and a playful tone to engage readers while addressing serious issues like bullying and friendship.
The Recess Queen's text and illustrations are full of clues that allow readers to make inferences about characters and events. Students will examine moments like Mean Jean's initial behavior on the playground and Katie Sue's decision to invite her to play. The repetitive text gives space for students to infer deeper emotions and messages, while illustrations provide an opportunity for readers to consider the meaning behind O'Neill's silly words and phrases.
The Recess Queen provides a rich opportunity for students to synthesize key ideas and themes. Students will explore how Mean Jean transforms from a bully to a friend and how the story's resolution reinforces the importance of kindness and inclusion. Activities encourage students to combine their understanding of the text with their personal experiences to develop deeper insights about positive social interactions.
This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use The Recess Queen by Alexis O'Neill as a springboard for instruction focused on past tense verbs with -ed.
By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing how past tense verbs with -ed are used inside of the text before engaging in both guided and independent practice with verbs.
This set of vocabulary development resources for The Recess Queen 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.
Read The Recess Queen 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 a hands-on and interactive way.
This resource includes matching/sorting cards and a sorting mat for four cause and effect sentences in The Recess Queen. 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 Recess Queen 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.
In The Recess Queen, we learn how kindness and inclusion can turn even the toughest recess moments into friendship. In this activity, students will reflect on ways to be kind and include others during playtime. They will write or draw their ideas on a crown, then cut it out and wear it proudly as a reminder to be a kind leader on the playground. This hands-on project encourages empathy, teamwork, and positive social behavior.
