Summarizing Expository Text
The students will watch the teacher model how to create a summary, and then work in groups to create a summary from an expository text.
Teacher with students in small group
Push Back, Pull Forward
Students will conduct an experiment to demonstrate force such as pushes and pulls.
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.
Earth Day: Join the Fight, for Sentences That are Right!
In this lesson, students are initially captivated by Earth Day-themed pictures, thus providing them with ideas to prewrite, and will have meaningful writing to revise. The lesson utilizes a mentor text to demonstrate the necessity of subjects and predicates. Students apply their knowledge of sentence syntax by revising a chosen sentence and rewriting the sentence to be shared with the class during a gallery walk.
Tackling Expository Text
The students will read and summarize expository text using a graphic organizer to aid the process.
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.
Making Inferences to Solve a Mystery
In learning stations, students use textual evidence and personal schema to make inferences and draw conclusions about the structure and elements of poetry, and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding.
Spying Evidence Through Text
Students will identify ideas in a text that are important to its meaning and write a letter demonstrating their understanding of the text.
Research Lesson TEKS
Character Analysis: Traits, Relationships, and Beyond
The students will be guided through exploring how actions affect characters and their decisions. Students will put themselves in the shoes of a character and think about how they feel and why.
Informational Inferences
In learning stations, students use textual evidence and personal schema to identify and generate inferences, to support understanding of an expository text.
Did this make this happen? Is this why this happened? All About Cause and Effect Relationships
Students will use a mentor text to identify cause and effect relationships. Students will also find the missing cause or effect. They will work collaboratively to complete a graphic organizer and use teacher-created anchor charts to help them in identifying the relationships.
What’s the Big Idea?
In cooperative groups, students rotate through stations to identify the main idea of selected passages while making inferences using expository text.
Poetic Inferences
In learning stations, students use textual evidence and personal schema to make inferences about the structure and elements of poetry, and provide textual evidence to support their understanding.
Text Features of Non-Fiction
The students will identify elements of nonfiction text by analyzing the importance of text features.
The Domino Effect of Cause and Effect
Students will identify explicit cause and effect relationships using keywords and phrases while reading relevant informational texts aligned with technology and current events.
Teacher Models Cause and Effect Relationships Within a Text
Using Text Features in Everyday Life
Students will use text features in a nonfiction passage to locate information, make and verify predictions about content and purpose of the text, and identify author’s purpose.
Text Features Detectives
Students will work together to answer questions about an expository text containing no text features. Then, students will justify their answers using the same text but with text features.
Stoichiometry
Students will model real-world formulas and chemical reactions to investigate the meaning of limiting reactants.
Apply the P.I.E.
This lesson is a review of the author's purpose, and also the first look into selecting textual evidence to support the purpose. The lesson will review a selected text as a group and then break into smaller groups so that each student is able to have hands-on experience evaluating the author’s purpose.
Matchup Mashup
Students will join like text features by reassembling a deconstructed nonfiction text.