In Watercress, the author, Andrea Wang, tells a seemingly simple story about a girl embarrassed by the food her family chooses to eat and embeds universal themes of intergenerational memories and the importance of family. Students will think deeply about the author's purpose in this lesson by noticing the descriptive language and specific details in the illustrations. They will also think about the characters' emotional journey and the larger message it conveys.

Watercress by Andrew Wang offers many opportunities for students to make connections to deepen their understanding of the story. This lesson plan prompts students to notice character's emotions and times they have been in similar situations. The lesson also asks students to make connections to the world around them.

Through the author's combination of descriptive language and vivid illustrations, Waiting provides many opportunities for readers to make inferences. In this lesson, students will practice making inferences about characters' emotions, motivations, and how characters change throughout the story. Students will also reflect on how making inferences helps them understand the characters and the story on a deeper level.

In this lesson, students will practice the strategy of synthesizing by tracking the characters' emotional journey throughout Watercress by Andrea Wang. The seemingly simple storyline allows students to pause and analyze in-depth what's happened at key points in the story. By the end of the story, students will glean the deeper meaning of the story through synthesizing.

Andrea Wang uses a variety of text structures in Watercress, which will allow readers to identify the text structures while reading an engaging picture book. The lesson covers a variety of text structures such as compare and contrast, description, cause and effect, and problem-solution.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Watercress by Andrea Wang as a springboard for instruction focused on vowels.

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

This set of vocabulary development resources for Watercress 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 Watercress 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.

Read Watercress 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 Watercress. 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.