The Next Steps to Great Writing
Students will write a draft that is sequenced and logical after brainstorming.
Teacher introducing lesson
Text Evidence and the Moral Lesson
Teacher will read How Spiders Got Eight Legs as a read-aloud. Students will write notes about what they think the moral is. Students will collaborate in groups to determine what they think the moral lesson is. Students will reread, highlight, and write the text evidence that identifies the moral lesson.
Click below to learn about the TEKS related to the unit and Research Lesson. The highlighted student expectation(s) is the chosen focus for the Research Lesson.
Connecting Author’s Purpose and Organizational Patterns
Students explore and analyze how the author can achieve a specific purpose by using a variety of organizational patterns.
Quality Questioning
In this lesson, students analyze, rate, and revise questions generated in response to their reading of a short story. They use the questions in student-led conversations and activities, helping them understand the connection between strong questioning, inferring, and communicating during reading.
Analyzing the Text for Summary and Connections
Students will critically think and communicate; they will summarize a text to understand and make connections to other texts, themselves, and the world.
Organized Authors: Name That Structure
Students will read a text passage, looking for and highlighting key words that indicate the appropriate organizational pattern of the text.
Students working
The Key to Key Signature
Students will review previous learning about half steps, whole steps, and enharmonics and will begin to learn the construction of tetrachords using the whole and half step sequence.
Civil War Inferring
Students will use Social Studies Weekly newspaper to make inferences about historical events using schema and text evidence.
Retelling Fiction with Logical Order
Students will be able to understand how to retell a fictional story in logical order using transitional words.
Sticky Note Summarizing
Students will determine the important parts of a story and recognize and compose an individual summary by using color-coordinated sticky notes and the Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then (SWBST) strategy. Students will practice correctly identifying the parts of the SWBST strategy during a read-aloud. Students will work in groups and read a short story together, identify key components, and compose a written summary. Students will demonstrate their ability to recognize a good summary by writing two components of summarization on an exit ticket.
Put on Your Detective Cap: Making Inferences
Students pretend to be detectives while being presented with various pictorial and textual clues that lead them to make an overall inference about what happened on Tuesday.
Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment (TMSFA)
Texas Education Code (TEC) §28.006(c-1) requires that students who do not meet the passing standard on the Grade 6 State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) reading test must be administered a reading assessment at the beginning of grade 7. The Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment (TMSFA) was developed with Texas students to be a valid and reliable instrument for determining students’ areas of instructional need.
The TMSFA is based on valid and reliable scientific research, thoroughly measures each domain of development, and is user-friendly. The following three domains of development are assessed using the TMSFA.
- Text Comprehension (Reading)
- Word Analysis
- Fluency
Who Is the Culprit?
Engaging in a crime scene investigation, students will collaboratively examine the evidence, make inferences about their observations, and write a detailed description of the crime. Students will then read an informational text about investigating a crime scene and answer inference questions.
Main Idea
Students will identify supporting details and the main idea in a passage.
Crime Scene Inferences
In learning stations, students use textual evidence and personal schema to generate inferences, make generalizations, and draw conclusions to support understanding about expository text.
Moving Beyond P. I. E.
In this lesson, students infer the author’s purpose of selected paragraphs of expository text. The lesson is designed with English learners in mind and utilizes instructional strategies designed to scaffold instruction such as collaborative learning strategies, student generated questions, anchor charts, and sentence frames to facilitate oral responses.
Inferring: It’s a Beast!
Using a digital forum, seventh-grade students will collaboratively generate authentic inferences about character motivation. Students will utilize textual evidence and draw from personal schema in order to make logical connections across multiple genres.
Inference in the Real World: Using Clues to Identify Key Details
Students will actively read as a critical component; they will infer in expository text.
Evaluating Inferences
Students will evaluate a set of inferences to determine if they are valid or invalid and use text evidence to support their stance. The lesson incorporates best practices for English learners (ELs) and at-risk students such as the use of graphic organizers, anchor charts, and cooperative learning.
Remembering Leaders
Students will read expository text, categorize findings, and reformulate the text into an obituary.
Teacher poised for modeling