Planning a Draft
Students will employ critical thinking skills to order details logically and become more effective at communicating their ideas to readers. The lesson will guide students toward using critical thinking in the planning phase of drafting to purposefully include details that interest readers.
Pack Your Bags!
Students learn to determine the difference between topic, central idea, and details using mystery bags, graphic organizers, and short passages.
Manifest Density
Students will design a foil boat and add mass to test relative density.
Students describing how they got their boat to float.
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.
Adventures in Inferring
Students will infer the message the author is trying to convey using schema and evidence from the text. Readers use this strategy, known as making inferences, to think about what they are reading.
Students progress from a surface-level understanding of text to a deeper understanding by processing and expressing details and examples to support their understanding of observations through background knowledge and textual evidence.
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Stop, Collaborate, and Rotate
Students will explore the Earth's rotation and its relation to the Sun and the Moon. Then, students will create a visual representation of this relationship and present it to the rest of the class.
Teacher doing Introduction
DNA Sequencing
In this lesson, students will investigate how gene expression is a regulated process controlled by DNA and the interpretations of codons through translation.
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.
How Authors Develop Complex Yet Believable Characters in Drama by Contrasting Characters
The students will identify characteristics of characters from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, explain why the characters are foils to each other, and use text evidence to support their understanding.
Santa Timeline Breakout
Students collaborate and critically-think to analyze resources from informational texts of various disciplines and unlock a breakout box. Once the box is unlocked, students receive a final text to summarize.
Author’s Purpose in a Bag
Students will infer from text evidence the author’s purpose and explain their thinking.
Paired Passages with a Purpose
Students will make inferences about the author’s purpose after reading paired passages involving the same subject.
Reading Between the Lines
In this lesson, students will expand their critical thinking skills by making inferences found in a short film and listening to a literary fictional text on tablets. Working collaboratively in groups, students will create anchor charts to demonstrate their understanding of making inferences and present their detailed anchor charts to their classmates.
Sound Effects, Poetic Elements, and Analysis, Oh My! Visualizing the Text to Gain Meaning Out of Poetry
Students will be asked to use metacognition as they analyze a poem, make inferences, and draw conclusions about the overall meaning of a text.
Did You Get the "Text" Message?
Students will work independently and collaboratively to recognize the theme within a variety of texts. Students will create theme topics and theme statements from texts read.
Poetry With Purpose
Students collaborate in small groups to discuss their peers’ poetry and assess the poetry according to the student-created rubric. The rubric assesses students’ ability to make meaningful connections to the poetic devices in their poetry. Through collaboration, they are building a culture of receptiveness among their peers.
Inferring with Dr. Seuss
Students will work collaboratively in groups as they practice their inferring skills using children’s literature books.
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.
It’s All in the Details
This lesson demonstrates a small group intervention that scaffolds instruction of main idea for native English or Spanish speaking students. This lesson is scripted in both languages.
Inferring Through Imagery and Figurative Language
Students rotate to four posters which contain a single stanza from a common poem (“Digging” by Seamus Heaney), marking key literary elements (imagery, diction, figurative language) before rotating to explain the connotation of the words and phrases selected by the previous group. After text marking, students regroup to discuss the inferential connections between literary terms and their connotative meaning to theorize thematic meaning within the poem.
Making an Inference
The class will review previous learning about how authors describe characters using speech, thoughts, effects on others, actions, and looks (STEAL). Students will make annotations on an excerpt using the STEAL strategy. We will talk them through making a guided inference. Students will complete a short-answer response on chart paper with evidence and inference for the focus question