Canadian Trailblazers Reading Comprehension Activities | Paper and Digital

This inclusive ELA resource for Canadian classrooms explains the accomplishments of Elsie MacGill, Mary Two-Axe Earley, Willie O'Ree and Stanley G. Grizzle. Using the science of reading, it builds independent reading strategies with high-interest passages while blending literacy with curriculum content.

This resource includes four weeks of content.

This English Language Arts resource includes nonfiction reading passages about people in Canada who fought for the rights of everyone. The passages are used to teach various comprehension skills. The main purpose of this resource is to build literacy skills as opposed to learning about the topics in the passages.

✅ The included content:

• Elsie MacGill: Canada's first female aeronautical engineer broke barriers and led the way by supervising the building of airplanes during World War Two; analyzing, evaluating, connecting, text features: italics, text features: captions, suffixes, nouns, verbs: past tense, compound words, imagining, extending, researching
• Mary Two-Axe Earley: fought for status rights and women's rights for Indigenous women in Canada; analyzing, context clues, text features: textbox, text features: headings, prefixes, root words, plurals, capital letters, punctuation, extending, imagining, researching
• Stanley G. Grizzle: fought for the rights of Black people in Canada as well as citizenship rights for everyone living in Canada; summarizing, sequencing, inferring, text feature: titles, text feature: sidebar, suffixes, syllables, adjectives, verbs: agreement, writing, synthesizing, researching
• Willie O'Ree: the NHL's first Black hockey player; analyzing, evaluating, connecting, root words, verbs: past tense, text feature: textbox, text feature: captions, apostrophes, similes, researching, extending, designing
• Comprehension Strategies: analyzing, keywords, compare & contrast, cause & effect, sequencing, summarizing, making connections, evaluating, prediction, questioning, inferring
• Word Work (morphology): vocabulary, context clues, syllables, prefixes, suffixes, root words, plurals, nouns, proper nouns, past tense verbs, antonyms, homonyms, synonyms, transition words, similes
• Text Features: textbox, heading, table, graph, title, photo, caption, bold, italics
• Conventions (spelling and grammar): capital letters, periods, commas, quotation marks, exclamation marks, question marks
• Putting it all together: researching, imagining, writing, extending, synthesizing

✅ Targeted Reading Skills of Nonfiction Text:

• Reading Passages: With approximately 250 words, the text is specifically written for elementary students by teachers with decades of reading instruction experience.
• Comprehension Skills: Teaches students how different skills can be used to help understand information that is read or express what has been learned.
• Word Parts (morphology): Teaches students how to break down words to help solve them or gather meaning.
• Conventions (grammar and mechanics): Details about spelling and punctuation including how and why certain symbols are used.
• Text Features: How text features are designed to help understand and organize information.
• Figurative Language: How language found in literature can be used to make text more interesting.
• Moving Beyond the Text: Gathering and combining information from the reading passage along with new material to learn more about the topic.

✅ Flexible Formats:

• Paper Versions: Printable and ready to use!
• Google Slides Versions: Fully digital for tech-friendly classrooms, with detailed troubleshooting support included. The slides include loose text that can be read by your assistive technology (but can easily be moved) for students who need independent support.
• Versatility: You can use either format or a mix.
• Student-Centred Design: The grade level is not included on any student pages to prevent any embarrassment if working below grade level. Student pages have plenty of space to write (or type). Pages have a small amount of content to avoid overwhelm.

✅ Teacher-Friendly Features:

• Quick Mini-Lessons: A lesson for each skill is included to save prep time. These lessons are designed to teach all the skills in this resource without any extra prep or materials. Most lessons take less than ten minutes.
• Answer Keys and Suggested Responses: Streamline marking and eliminate the guessing about how students should answer questions.
• Assessment Tools: Evaluate reading and comprehension skills effectively. We have included instructions to turn the reading passage into a reading record so you can see the progress of your students.

✅ Why Teachers Love This Resource:

• Spiral Method: Combine this resource with others in this series to review, teach, and practice skills in a consistent, engaging way.
• Student Independence: Each resource in the series builds confidence and mastery, empowering students to tackle reading challenges with success. The more resources from this series that you use, the more independence your students will develop.
• Engaging Content: The blend of interesting topics with ELA skills keeps students motivated and curious.
• Perfect for Canadian Teachers: Aligned with the needs of Canadian classrooms, this resource provides age-appropriate content and aligns with best practices in literacy instruction. Canadian spellings and grammar conventions have been used throughout this resource.
• Includes Another Free Resource: When you sign up for our email list, we’ll send you another week for free. Details are inside the resource.

Watch your students grow as readers!

This resource supports:

• Canadian Grade 5 classrooms (though use your discretion for the level of reading required by your students).
• Canadian history and social studies lessons.
• Black History Month, Women's History Month, Indigenous Peoples History Month

We have other sets of resources, all written for Canadian students:

• Becoming Canada (recommended for Grade 5)
• Weather Wonders (recommended for Grade 5)

Ninja Note: This file is a ZIP file with each resource as a PDF inside. You will need to download the ZIP file and extract the PDF files. To access the digital version, open the PDFs and use the link inside the files.

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