Learning to identify important characters and events while reading is an important skill for second grade readers to develop. Use this determining importance mini lesson to teach students why it's important to pay attention to character traits, actions, and the important lessons main characters learn while enjoying Tomie dePaola's classic Irish folktale.

Tomie dePaola's fanciful folktale about the laziest man in Ireland, a chance meeting with a leprechaun, and a gigantic potato gives readers lots of opportunities to practice making predictions while reading. The text-dependent questions included in this mini lesson make it easy for readers to stop and think about the text in order to make logical predictions about what might happen next.

Synthesizing is all about paying attention to the way your understanding of a text changes as you read. This synthesizing mini lesson helps readers focus on the problems Jamie O'Rourke creates, how he solves his problems, and what happens when new problems arise. Use the step by step mini lesson and student practice pages to model how readers synthesize while reading this fun folktale that's perfect for St. Patrick's Day or any time of year.

Understanding how authors use different text structures to tell stories can be a tricky thing to teach. This mini lesson and set of activities make it easy to show students how Tomie dePaola used description, sequencing, problem and solution, compare and contrast, and cause and effect to tell the story of Jamie O'Rourke and his big potato.

Help readers practice visualizing to improve comprehension using this mini lesson and Tomie dePaola's Irish folktale. Students will enjoy finding words that help them bring the story to life inside of their imaginations. Complete with text-dependent questions, a student practice page, and a Reader's Notebook prompt, you'll have everything you need to teach readers how to visualize while reading Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato: An Irish Folktale by Tomie dePaola as a springboard for instruction focused on inflectional endings.

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

This set of vocabulary development resources for Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato: An Irish Folktale 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 Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato: An Irish Folktale.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato: An Irish Folktale. 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 Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato: An Irish Folktale 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 Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato: An Irish Folktale. 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 Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato: An Irish Folktale 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.