Pink and Say is a historical fiction book set during the Civil War. Your students will naturally ask questions about this time in our nation's history. The seemingly impossible friendship depicted in this story between two young soldiers will also spark your students' natural curiosity.

Pink and Say is a profound story offering readers advanced practice in determining importance. Readers will need to start by determining their purpose for reading the book and then determine which information is most important to remember based on their purpose for reading.

This book presents several strong themes, including war, friendship, slavery and heroism. Advanced readers will be able to identify messages within this story and support each message with evidence from the text.

This book works well for supporting advanced readers who are learning to make more sophisticated inferences. Readers will need to use what they already know to make inferences about human emotion and the circumstances of war during this time period.

Using this text and lesson plan, students will demonstrate effective application of prior knowledge and multiple reading strategies to draw out the full meaning and impact of this emotional story.

If your students are ready to practice higher-level visualizing using a more advanced text, Pink and Say is an ideal resource for you. The author writes strong textual descriptions of scene, action and emotion. As readers become more advanced, they will begin to use inferential thinking to create strong mental images.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Pink and Say by Patricia Polacco as a springboard for instruction focused on vowels.

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

This set of vocabulary development resources for Pink and Say 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 Pink and Say.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with Pink and Say. 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 Pink and Say 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 Pink and Say. 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 Pink and Say 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.