Build Background

• Involve students in a discussion of ways in which they have traveled. Ask students who have traveled by train to share their experiences. Discuss the pros and cons of train travel. If possible, show students pictures of high-speed trains such as one of Japan's Shinkansens or one of France's TGVs.

Preview the Book

Introduce the Strategy: Summarization

• Tell students that one way to understand and remember what they read is to summarize paragraphs, sections, or chapters of a book in their mind or on paper. Explain that summarizing means to organize the most important information they have read.
• Give students a copy of the book and have them preview the front and back covers and read the title. Have students discuss what they see on the covers and offer ideas as to what kind of book this is and what it might be about.
• Direct students to the table of contents. Remind students that the table of contents provides an overview of what the book is about. Each chapter title provides an idea of what they will read in the book. After reviewing the table of contents, model using it to summarize what the book is about.
• Think aloud: To summarize what I've read in the table of contents, I need to think about what's important and what isn't. It seems to me that all of the chapter titles must be important or they wouldn't be included here. When I'm summarizing something, I need to put it into my own words. Otherwise I'm just copying what the author wrote. The titles in this book are written as questions. That makes summarizing a little tricky. I can say that I've learned that this book is going to tell me who built the railroad, who won some sort of race, something about someone who conquered a mountain, and where something or someone met. I need to read the chapters in order to understand the titles.
• Have students preview the rest of the book, looking at photos, captions, maps, sidebar text, and the glossary.

Introduce the Vocabulary

• Remind students of the strategies they can use to work out words they don't know. For example, they can use what they know about letter and sound correspondences to figure out the word. They can look for base words, prefixes, or suffixes. They can use the context to work out meanings of unfamiliar words.
• Model how to apply word-attack strategies. Point out a word in bold, such as the word engineers on page 6. Read with students the second and third sentences in the paragraph. Tell students that from what you've read in the sentences, these engineers didn't have the kind of technology that would help them figure out where and how to build the railroad. This tells you that engineers have something to do with looking at the layout of the land before it is built upon. Have students follow along as you read the sentence to confirm the meaning of the word.
• Remind students that they should check whether words make sense by rereading the sentence. Tell them to use the glossary if they are still uncertain about a word's meaning.
• For additional teaching tips on word-attack strategies, click here.

Set the Purpose

• Have students pause at the end of each chapter and quickly summarize what they have read. Students can summarize mentally or use a pencil and scrap paper.

Student Reading

• Guide the reading: Have students read the Introduction. Tell them to decide what the Introduction is about and to underline the most important information. Tell students to go back and reread the section if they finish before everyone else.
• When they have finished reading, ask students what the Introduction is about and what they underlined.
• Model summarizing the main idea and important details for the first chapter.
• Think aloud: I think the main idea of the Introduction is that travel from the east to the west coast was very difficult without the railroad. As I read, I underlined the words, phrases, and sentences I thought were most important. In the first paragraph I underlined the phrases, "it could take six months to travel from New York to San Francisco," "if you left New York in April…you would not arrive in California until October," and "carry…hunt and gather food," "…get lost…freezing, wind-swept prairies…," "creaky wagon that would often break down." I can see that some of the words and phrases I underlined aren't important ideas. They might tell interesting details, but I won't include them in the summary. (Cross out any unimportant details on the list created with the students.) I can summarize the important information like this: Traveling from the East to the West was difficult and took a long time. But many people wanted to move west because of the nice weather, good farmland, and gold. Train travel was the fastest way to get places, but no one knew how a railroad could be built to connect both sides of the country.
• Reinforce that a summary tells the most important idea in the paragraph, section, or chapter, and the important details about it. Unimportant information is not used. Discuss how students will decide what information is important and what is not.
• Tell students to read the remainder of the story, looking for the most important idea and details about it in each chapter.

    Tell the students to make a small question mark in their books beside any word they do not understand or cannot pronounce. These can be addressed in the discussion that follows.

Reflect on the Reading Strategies

• Ask students what words they marked in their books. Use this opportunity to model how they could read these words using decoding strategies and context clues.
• Reinforce that mentally summarizing each chapter will help them understand and remember what they have read.

Comprehension: Main idea and details

• Introduce and model: Explain that every writer has a main idea in mind for a book when he or she writes it. In addition, the writer has a main idea for each section or chapter of the book. The headings often provide clues as to what the main idea of each section or chapter is about.
• Check for understanding: Ask students what they think the main idea of the first chapter might be by looking at the table of contents. As a group, determine the important words, phrases, and sentences in the chapter. Have students use the last page of the book to write a short summary that includes the main idea and most important details of the chapter. Have several students share their summaries.
• Independent practice: Have students work independently to complete the Main Idea and Details worksheet for each chapter listed. Discuss their responses. If students disagree about the main idea of a chapter, have them justify their responses by identifying clues in the text.
• Extend the discussion:

   Instruct students to use the inside cover of their book to write whether or not they would like to travel by train and to explain why.

Grammar, Mechanics, and Usage: Sequence adverbs

• Explain that when a writer wants the reader to understand when something happened or will happen, or wants to tell the reader the order in which something was done or should be done, he or she uses signal words. These are words that alert the reader that they are reading about a sequence of some kind.
• Write the following words on the board: first, second, third, first of all, after, after that, then, next, finally. Explain that when each of these words is used to show sequence, it is followed by a comma. Direct students to the last paragraph on page 16. Ask them to identify the word that tells that this is the last thing that happened (finally). Have students circle the comma.
• Direct students to pages 10 and 11. Have them underline sentences that have sequence signal words and circle the commas. Discuss their responses. Discuss how looking for sequence adverbs helps them understand the order in which the events occurred.

Vocabulary: Compound words

• Write the word railroad on the board. Review or explain that this is a compound word, and that a compound word is made by joining one word with another word. Use the word in a sentence: Building a railroad is hard work.
• Direct students to page 4. Ask them to find another compound word (farmland) Ask them to identify the two words that have been joined to make the word. Write farm + land on the board. Ask a volunteer to use the word in a sentence.

    Have students use their books and find the compound words, except for railroad and farmland. Tell them to circle the words and write the first ten they find on the Compound Words worksheet. Tell them they do not need to write a word more than once even if they find it again in the story. Explain that they are then to write the two words that were joined to make the compound word. Tell them to use two of the compound words to write two sentences of their own at the bottom of the worksheet. (Note: Hyphenated compound words are not included in this lesson.)

Independent Reading

• Allow the students to read their books independently or with a partner. Partners can take turns reading parts of the book.

Home Connection

• Give the students their books to take home to read with parents, caregivers, siblings, or friends.

Writing Connection

• Have students write a historical fiction story about a person who either worked on building the railroad or someone who rode the train once the railroad was completed. Explain that historical fiction contains some information that is true, such as the names of the businessmen who owned the railroads or the fact that the Chinese were excellent workers. Have students share their stories and display on a bulletin board titled "We've Been Working on the Railroad."

Social Studies Connection

• Show students the documentary The Iron Road by Neil Goodwin of Peace River films. Have students take notes on information they learned by watching the film that they did not read in the book. Discuss their notes. Encourage students to research any area they find of interest.

Monitor students to determine if they can:

• use the strategy of summarization to understand and remember nonfiction text.
• identify main ideas and details.
• recognize sequence adverbs and proper comma placement.
• understand and use compound words.

Comprehension Checks