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Just Ask Activities and Lesson Plans for 2024

Elementary teachers looking for lesson plans and activities for Just Ask will find this post helpful. It includes resource recommendations, free teaching ideas, and information about the book. You’ll have everything you need to deliver engaging interactive read aloud lessons based on this story.

With themes of diversity and advocation, this Just Ask picture book by Sonya Sotomayor is a favorite in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms. It will be a big hit in your classroom too! Learn more about this book below!

Engage Your Students with Just Ask Lesson Plans & Activities in 3 Easy Steps:

  1. Read a summary of Just Ask. You can find it in the section below.
  2. Check out the teaching ideas for reading comprehension strategies, grammar topics and social emotional learning skills that can be taught using this children’s book.
  3. Download the book companion to make lesson planning simple with Just Ask reading comprehension questions, writing prompts, teaching ideas & no-prep extension activities.

JUST ASK SUMMARY

Just Ask! Is written by Sonia Sotomayor, an associate justice of the Supreme Court. The book starts off with Sonia narrating and explaining that she and her friends are building a garden. Just like things in the garden are different, her friends are, too. Sonia encourages readers to ask questions when they are curious about someone.

 

Throughout the book, readers are introduced to the children that are working in the garden. Each one is diverse and explains what makes them unique. There are blind and deaf children, some have medical conditions like allergies or diabetes, and some have conditions like Autism, Down syndrome, or Tourette’s.

 

Sonia celebrates the differences of all the children and sends a message that it is okay to ask questions when you don’t understand something.

JUST ASK LESSON PLAN IDEAS

Each of our 400+ Starts With a Story book companions come with a teacher’s guide to make lesson planning quick and easy, printable worksheets and digital resources that cover ALL of the standards-based reading comprehension skills.

When it comes to writing lesson plans and finding activities for Just Ask, we’ve already done all of the heavy lifting for you.

We found this book was especially good at teaching the topics listed below.

READING COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS

The text-based Just Ask reading comprehension questions focus on:

  • summarize | retell
  • point of view
  • making connections
  • identify the main idea
  • author’s purpose
  • identifying theme | message | moral

LITERATURE-BASED SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING LESSONS

We found this story to be a great SEL picture book to promote:

  • diversity
  • advocation

GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY & WORD STUDY

  • plural nouns
  • helping verbs
  • types of sentences, antonyms

JUST ASK ACTIVITIES

You’ll receive all of the following resources aligned to the story:

  • comprehension questions
  • 30 writing prompts with themed paper
  • vocabulary activities
  • word study print & go activities
  • ideas for grammar lessons with focus sentence printables
  • social emotional learning discussion topics
  • graphic organizers to target specific comprehension skills and strategies
Just Ask! book companion
elementary teacher reading aloud a picture book to her students

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BOOK INFO FOR ELEMENTARY TEACHERS

What are the reading levels for Just Ask?

  • Lexile® Measure: 700
  • Guided Reading Level: Q
  • DRA Level: 38
  • Accelerated Reader Level (ARC): 4.1

Who is the author? Who is the illustrator?

The book was written by Sonya Sotomayor. It was illustrated by Rafael López.

What genre is Just Ask?

It is a fiction book. You may want to check out our genre activities or read our blog post, How to Teach Genre to Elementary Students.

How many pages are in the book?

The story is 32 pages long.

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