Understanding Text Features
This lesson guides students to use sentence stems to clarify their thinking as they identify and locate text features in isolation while using an interactive text features wall. Students will then transition to gaining information from text features as they search for text features in their books and share the information gained with their partners.
Inference Detectives
Students will use mystery bags and graphic organizers to identify clues and use their schema to make an inference. Students conclude this lesson by connecting text as evidence and playing a context clue game with cucumber sentences.
Stages of Ecological Succession
Students will collaborate on a electronic slideshow presentation and observe, record, and describe the role of ecological succession including both primary and secondary succession.
One Thing Leads to Another
Students apply their understanding of the text in order to retell the plot sequence.
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.
Biodiversity
Students will explore biodiversity concepts through several activities including a video, a card sort, think-pair-shares, food webs, and four corners.
Building a Watershed
Students will model the effects of human activity on watersheds.
It’s All About the Bend, No Breaking
Students will experiment with choosing tools to measure around a previously created pet habitat in preparation for choosing appropriately sized food bowls. Students will use a graphic organizer to record tools chosen and to explain why those tools were or were not a good choice for continuous measurement.
Area of Composite Figures
Student groups will work collaboratively using the appropriate formulas to find the area of simple figures and combine the area of each shape to find the area of composite figures in real-world situations.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment
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Subtraction Seekers
Students will be introduced to subtraction in an inquiry-based lesson that uses concrete examples and allows students to explore through different settings and scenarios.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment
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Consonant Blends
Students will focus on initial blends using multiple opportunities for multisensory responses to recognize, sort, and blend sounds.
Humpty Dumpty's Mystery Fall
Students will listen to the story of Humpty Dumpty and share what they know about the nursery rhyme character. Then, they will help solve the math mystery of Humpty Dumpty and determine the number of broken eggs by finding the missing addend.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment
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Making Ten is Easy as Pie!
Students will practice composing 10 by interacting with a counting story, playing a dice game with ten frames and response sheets, and participating in a small group to extend the learning with three addends.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Related to the Unit
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Modeling the Path of Digestion
Students model the path of digestion using household items.
Diagramming Dinosaurs
Students will use a verbal representation to explore a constant rate of change in the size of dinosaurs over a period of time and represent their data by graphing.
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.
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.
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.
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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