A Reader’s Survival Guide: Connecting and Synthesizing Ideas in Nonfiction Texts
This lesson is designed to teach students to synthesize and make connections between ideas within a text and with previous texts students have read.
Consonant Blends
Students will focus on initial blends using multiple opportunities for multisensory responses to recognize, sort, and blend sounds.
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.
Click below to learn about the TEKS related to this unit.
Explore Revising and Editing with some Classroom Adventure
While “scooting” from one example to another, students will explore sentences in order to determine what end punctuation is necessary and why. Students will also collaborate to explore sentences in order to identify what edits are necessary and why.
Teachers during Introduction
Intelligible Inferences
Students will work in cooperative learning groups that foster empathy to make inferences from pictures and text. They will discuss the differences between inferences made from pictures and inferences made from text.
Students working on poster
Outlining Our Memory
Students will compare a silly short story to a detailed story from a previous lesson. Then, they will write a rough draft/outline about a memory using details and transition words.
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.
Text Feature Fun!
Students will locate and identify text features in non-fiction books while matching the purpose to the appropriate text feature.
Empowered by the Evidence: Making Inferences with Confidence
A mini-lesson on how to select the best text evidence to support an inference or draw a conclusion is presented. Teachers use the think-aloud method to model how to use a checklist in order to identify the strongest support provided in the text. Students are then asked to work with a group to discuss and support a given conclusion drawn from a self-chosen text. They are encouraged to use the checklist to ensure the best evidence is identified
Author’s Purpose in a Bag
Students will infer from text evidence the author’s purpose and explain their thinking.
A Trip to the Hospital
Students participate in a set of stations about the work done in different areas of a hospital. During each station, students revise paragraphs based on word choice, clarity, and transitions while also looking at introductions and adding or deleting sentences.
Sensing Poetry
Students locate sensory details and create their own sensory detail poem.
Teacher discusses the sensory details that correspond with the five senses
Using Captions to Infer
The students will be shown a picture with a caption. The students will partner up and discuss what they see and have read in the caption. The students must make an inference based off of the evidence and write an inference statement. Students will upload image and inference statements to a class sharing app for others to read and comment on.
Inferences with Wolfie and Dot
In this lesson, students use text evidence and background knowledge to make inferences. Students infer during each phase of the lesson using a variety of literary sources and activities.
Digging in with Text Features
Students will read an expository text and apply text features by comparing and contrasting information regarding two animals’ homes.
Teacher models how to use a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast two things
Summarizing Fiction
Students will analyze effective and ineffective summaries of a fictional text and identify the characteristics that classify the summaries as either effective or ineffective.
Teacher giving task
Actions Speak Louder Than Words
First-grade students will discuss, identify, and compare the physical and emotional traits of two characters from the fictional book, The Recess Queen. In stations, students will generate inferences about character motivation and describe characters and their actions while making personal and logical connections.