Because of Wallace's wild imagination, students will naturally have plenty of questions about his cowboy summer vacation. Readers will use both the text and illustrations to ask and answer questions in order to gain a deeper understanding of this tall tale.

Mark Teague's simple story is an ideal anchor text for a mini lesson focused on determining importance. Use this lesson plan and set of student resources to help readers identify the most important characters, settings, and events in the story.

Synthesizing is an important higher level thinking skill that takes lots of practice. Use this mini lesson to model how readers can track the way a character changes over the course of a story. Students will determine whether Wallace's character changes as a result of the events he encounters on his wrangling journey.

This understanding text structure mini lesson and resource set introduces students to a variety of different text structures including description, sequencing, cause and effect, and problem and solution.

Author and Illustrator, Mark Teague makes teaching the strategy of visualizing fun and exciting. Through his well thought out word choices and colorful, detailed pictures, students will enjoy making mental pictures in their mind, while extending their knowledge of both the strategy and story!

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use How I Spent My Summer Vacation by Mark Teague as a springboard for instruction focused on suffixes.

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

This set of vocabulary development resources for How I Spent My Summer Vacation 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 How I Spent My Summer Vacation.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with How I Spent My Summer Vacation. 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 How I Spent My Summer Vacation 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 How I Spent My Summer Vacation. 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 How I Spent My Summer Vacation 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.