Exploring Identity and Diving Deep into the Complex Meaning of Poetry
This lesson is designed to teach students to make complex inferences, choose specific text evidence that strongly supports the inference, and develop a coherent explanation of how the evidence strongly supports the validity of the idea within the genre of poetry.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Related to the Unit
Click below to learn about the TEKS related to this unit.
Can You Summarize?
Students will work with partners, as well as independently, to create and evaluate summaries of 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.
A Lesson in Kindness and Thematic Complexity
Students explore their internal definition of kindness, using visual and textual evidence to collaboratively expand that definition and perform a close reading of a poem. Students then use internal text to express the author’s complex and subtle thematic message.
Super Sleuths SIP on Vocabulary: Using Sentences, Illustrations, and Prefixes/Suffixes to Make Meaning
Students will learn strategies to find the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary words using the acronym SIP (sentence, illustration, prefixes/suffixes).
Catch Me If You Can—Retelling "The Gingerbread Man"
Students retell or re-enact events in sequence from "The Gingerbread Man" using pictures.
Author’s Purpose, Text Features, Informational Text, and Daily Three
Students will follow the Daily Three structure to engage in mini-lessons regarding author’s purpose, text features, guided reading, work on writing, read to self, and word work. The students will also infer the author’s purpose for writing a book using a book order form.
Teaching Text Features of Elephant Proportions
Using a graphic organizer, students will collaboratively use text features to analyze an expository text. Students will locate information from the text to extract meaning and understanding about a topic.
Tic-Tac-Toe Text Features
Students will participate in a scavenger hunt and will be given a tic-tac-toe grid with clues about specific text features. The students will use the clues to locate specific information in the text.
One Step at a Time: A Lesson on Writing Procedural Text and the Power of Revising!
This lesson is designed to help young writers develop confidence in their writing abilities while being encouraged to edit and revise. Writers should develop revision skills to include detailed description while writing procedural text.
Be an Editing Star with Checklists and TPR!
Students review editing marks using TPR (Total Physical Response), while listening to a reading of a mentor text. Next, students use a brief procedural composition to edit for punctuation, capitalization, commas, and complete sentences. Students also use a checklist to edit a peer’s writing.
Too Hot for Main Idea
Students will collaborate and examine a reading passage to determine the topic and main idea of the passage.
Teacher Introducing Lesson
What Does the “Text Feature” Say?
Students will apply knowledge of text features to locate information in specific text to help better understand what they are reading.
Teacher reviews text features with the class
Retell Cafe
The lesson requires students to retell events of fictional stories in a logical order. Students work independently and in cooperative groups using manipulatives and a hands-on approach to sequence events in a story.
A Case of Character Traits
In literacy stations, students will describe how Camilla Cream’s internal and external character traits, motivations, and feelings changed throughout the fictional text, A Bad Case of Stripes.
Putting the Pieces Together
Students will use what they have learned about text features and the Answer—Cite—Explain (ACE) strategy, to infer meaning from nonfiction text.
Vocabulary Detectives
Students will be actively engaged in working on a Frayer Model to determine the definition of a vocabulary word, using the word in the correct context in a sentence, drawing an illustration of the word, and providing non-examples of the word. Through this activity they will be thinking critically, collaborating, as well as monitoring their own learning, as they are modeling their own understanding of an unfamiliar vocabulary word.
Sentence Structure
Students will identify different types of sentence structures within a mentor text and demonstrate the understanding of varying sentence types by creating correctly structured and punctuated compound and complex sentences from simple sentences given by the teacher.
Teacher giving instructions
Who is My Neighbor?
Students will make inferences using evidence gathered from a collection of objects and a text.
Teacher going through description of inferring