In this lesson, students use text evidence and background knowledge to generate and evaluate inferences about the author's purpose for specific sections of a passage as well as the entire passage. The lesson is designed with English learners (ELs) and students from families that speak nonstandard dialects of English in mind. The lesson provides scaffolded instruction through the use of strategies designed to make input comprehensible: visuals, graphic organizers, sentence frames, hand gestures, and collaborative learning.

In this lesson, students rotate to various learning stations and work with a partner to complete tasks that require them to generate inferences, infer the theme of short reading passages, write personal narratives or stories that exemplify a selected theme, and develop Tier Two high utility vocabulary. The lesson incorporates best practices for English learners (ELs) and at-risk students such as the use of collaborative learning, graphic organizers, anchor charts, and technology applications.

Students will discover and use knowledge of Greek and Latin roots to determine the meaning of unknown words.

Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment

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Students will apply revision strategies to mentor texts. They also will have the opportunity to create a new book.

Students will discover the necessary components of a complete sentence and use the complete subject and complete predicate in their own writing through a process called ratiocination.

Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment

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This lesson offers an engaging format for fourth graders to spend time working with different cause-and-effect situations and text to help move them toward the objective of correctly identifying an implicit cause-and-effect relationship within a text.

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Students will learn how to use textual evidence to make inferences and to support their understanding.

Students will participate in a workshop-style lesson that includes partner and small-group work, teacher modeling, and independent reflection to not only label and identify text features within informational text, but to also connect the feature to its purpose.

Students will create compound sentences from simple sentences.

Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment

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The teacher will engage the students to make inferences through visuals, pictures, and informational text using problem-solving and self-questioning strategies.

Students will work together and problem-solve in a timed breakout session to gather clues and answer questions involving cause-and-effect, sequential, and comparative relationships in text. 

Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment

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This lesson teaches students to use the Get the Gist strategy to find the main idea of a section. Students will then put those Get the Gist statements together to begin a written summary of their text.

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In this lesson, students will write about a classmate’s best day.  They will then add details to the writing to support the central idea. This lesson integrates the instruction of the main idea in reading and writing.

Students will participate in hands-on activities to extend their knowledge of the parts of speech. 

Students will focus on context clues in a vocabulary lesson.

Students learn new ways to evaluate their thinking when making local and global inferences and justifying their validity.

This lesson is structured as a gradual release model of cause and effect. Students start by identifying cause and effect within a sentence, then progress to paragraphs, and finally finding cause and effect relationships on a given page in the book. This lesson integrates fourth-grade social studies standards with a text about the Alamo.

Students will be able to identify cause and effect relationships using an expository text.

Students will use a checklist to peer edit a composition. They will check for coherence through the proper use of transition words and conjunctions.

Students will work collaboratively to infer the implied meaning of a metaphor used in a poem. Students will complete a graphic organizer in which they discuss with their peers the two items being compared in the metaphor, write and illustrate the literal meaning of each word being compared, and use this information to infer the implied meaning of the metaphor. The lesson has a strong focus on vocabulary development and is designed with English learners (ELs) in mind.