Mapping Out Our Learning
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.
Rolling into Compound Sentences
Students will create compound sentences from simple sentences.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment
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It's a Maniac Breakout
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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Our Best Day
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.
Reading on the Farm
In learning stations, students collaboratively generate inferences and make predictions about expository text.
What's in a Name?
Students will participate in hands-on activities to extend their knowledge of the parts of speech.
Diving Deeper: Using Text Evidence to Support Inferences
Students learn new ways to evaluate their thinking when making local and global inferences and justifying their validity.
Investigating Cause and Effect Through the Lens of the Alamo
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.
Retelling Fiction with Logical Order
Students will be able to understand how to retell a fictional story in logical order using transitional words.
Summarizing with Sarah at the ER
The purpose of this lesson is to sequence the events of a story chronologically and be able to summarize the major events.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment
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Teaming up with Transitions
Students participate in an activity where they must link cause and effect statements using transition words. The lesson is designed with English learners in mind, and it includes instructional strategies designed to provide comprehensible input, such as visuals and collaborative learning.
Increasing Student Agency with Nonfiction Text
Students compare deep reading with an iceberg. Instruction focuses on teaching students’ close reading and annotation skills and increasing agency as students dive into informational text. Students are empowered through conversations, tech tools, and co-creation of criteria to read deeply.
Combining Sentences
Students will manipulate word and punctuation cards from mentor sentences to compose and decompose compound sentences.
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.
Tackling Transitions
In this lesson, students will learn how to effectively use transition words. These will be used to connect ideas and organize the flow of their writing so it is coherent.
The Characteristics of the Mystery Letter "H"
Students will identify and apply characteristics of an alphabetical letter (mystery letter Hh) through various hands-on activities and cooperative group work.
Character Traits
Students will be able to identify characters, their traits, and the reason for their actions.
Revising Sentences
Students will revise a simple sentence by copying it on a series of sticky notes and adding new words using glitter pens and star-shaped sticky notes.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment
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Rhyming with Visuals
The teacher will model how to recognize rhyming words by hearing them, seeing them, reading them, and writing them. Then the students will practice hearing, seeing, reading, and writing “at” word family words.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Related to the Unit
This unit connects to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) by fostering a continuance in the area of phonological awareness as begun in previous lessons and introducing the exploration of nursery rhymes, poetry, and lullabies through literature and language play.
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My Version of the Three Little Pigs
Students will create their own version of "The Three Little Pigs" using story elements on a Beginning, Middle, End (BME) story map. First, students will draft their story map with detailed pictures in sequential order, and then go back and add their words later. Once their story is completed, students will be able to retell their story to peers and their teacher.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment
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.