Use Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens to strengthen your students' comprehension skills, build their vocabulary, and help them understand how words work.
Dive into the clever trickster tale Tops & Bottoms by Janet Stevens, where Hare's quick thinking and Bear's laziness make for a fun and memorable story. This resource set helps students practice essential comprehension strategies: Making Predictions, Identifying Author's Purpose, and Determining Importance. Each activity guides readers to think critically about the characters, plot, and lessons in this folktale. In addition, students will explore a word work activity that strengthens their understanding of regular and irregular past tense action verbs. To extend learning, a creative writing activity invites students to write an advice column from the perspective of Bear or Hare. Together, these resources build comprehension, grammar, and writing skills while keeping students engaged in a story they'll love.
The clever twists and turns in Tops & Bottoms make it a perfect story for practicing the strategy of determining importance. Students will examine which details truly matter—like which parts of the plants are edible, how Hare plants his crops, and how Bear's choices affect the outcome. By focusing on these important details, readers will better understand Hare's cleverness, Bear's laziness, and the lesson behind the tale. This strategy helps students recognize how authors guide us to focus on the key elements of a story.
Tops & Bottoms provides an engaging way for students to practice identifying the author's purpose. By analyzing how Hare always seems to outsmart Bear and how Bear finally learns his lesson, students consider why the author chose to tell this story. Guided questions help readers uncover the central message about the value of hard work and clever thinking. Students will reflect on how folktales often carry morals and explore how this story communicates its purpose through both text and illustrations.
Janet Stevens' Tops & Bottoms is filled with opportunities for prediction. From Bear's first decision to choose "tops," to each new crop that Hare plants, students can use clues to predict what might happen next. Will Bear finally win, or will Hare outsmart him again? Guided activities encourage readers to make predictions, revise them as they read, and support their thinking with evidence from the story and illustrations. This builds critical thinking and engagement while reinforcing the fun, trickster-tale pattern of the book.
This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Tops & Bottoms by Janet Stevens as a springboard for instruction focused on past tense verbs.
By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing how regular and irregular past tense verbs are used inside of the text before engaging in both guided and independent practice with verbs.
This set of vocabulary development resources for Tops & Bottoms 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.
Understanding cause and effect is a key comprehension and language skill. The text structure of Tops & Bottoms 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 Tops & Bottoms by Janet Stevens, Bear learns about hard work while Hare shows off his clever tricks. In this activity, students step into the role of one of these characters to write an advice column. With guided prompts, they'll practice perspective-taking, strengthen comprehension, and build creative writing skills—all while having fun connecting to the story.
Read Tops & Bottoms 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 Tops & Bottoms. 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.
