Waiting is a smart book to use for a lesson focused on asking questions, especially for younger readers. In this lesson, students will be prompted to pause and ask questions they have about the events, characters, and setting. They will also monitor their use of the strategy and how it helps them as a reader.

In Waiting, the author, Kevin Henkes, gently invites readers to think about the importance of waiting and friendship. Students will think deeply about the author's purpose in this lesson by noticing why the author chose to use certain words and pictures. They will also think about important events, and the lesson it conveys to the reader.

Waiting is a familiar concept to students, which makes this the perfect book to practice the strategy of making connections. This lesson plan prompts students to make connections to the text, as well as reflect on how this strategy helps them comprehend the story.

Through the author's combination of sparse words and telling illustrations, Waiting provides many opportunities for readers to make inferences. In this lesson, students will practice making inferences about events in the story, as well as characters' actions and feelings. Throughout the lesson, students will reflect on how inferences help them as a reader.

Because of its simplicity, Waiting is the perfect book for younger readers to practice the complex strategy of synthesizing. In this lesson, students will track how and why the characters change their mind about waiting. By the end of the story, students will glean the deeper meaning of the story through synthesizing.

This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Waiting by Kevin Henkes as a springboard for instruction focused on suffixes.

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

This set of vocabulary development resources for Waiting 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 Waiting.

Use this Running Record to assess oral reading fluency with Waiting. 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.

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.

Read Waiting 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 Waiting. 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 Waiting 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.