Fun with First Drafts
The lesson will support students’ writing a first draft of a personal narrative story by providing opportunities to listen to their previously recorded story, review their (graphic organizer) draft web, and add sticky notes with further details to their webs.
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.
Write, Revise, Repeat!
Students develop their perseverance skills as they continue to revise their writing for coherence. The teacher focuses on providing students with three tools to develop the students’ paragraphs for sentence-to-sentence connectedness and clarity.
Inferring the Message in Poems
Students look for meaning in poems using poetry tools and work in groups to identify how parts of poems fit together to give a message. They then independently infer the message from a poem their teacher reads.
Main Idea
Students will identify supporting details and the main idea in a passage.
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.
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
Remembering Leaders
Students will read expository text, categorize findings, and reformulate the text into an obituary.
Teacher poised for modeling
Did You Get the "Text" Message?
Students will work independently and collaboratively to recognize the theme within a variety of texts. Students will create theme topics and theme statements from texts read.
The Golden Touch
Students will practice using a protocol to create a summary of an expository text.
Are You Speaking Greek?
Students will be able to determine the meaning of words using Greek, Latin, or other linguistic roots and affixes.
Can You Summarize?
Students will work with partners, as well as independently, to create and evaluate summaries of expository text.
Reading Between the Lines
In this lesson, students will expand their critical thinking skills by making inferences found in a short film and listening to a literary fictional text on tablets. Working collaboratively in groups, students will create anchor charts to demonstrate their understanding of making inferences and present their detailed anchor charts to their classmates.
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.
Combining Sentences
Students will manipulate word and punctuation cards from mentor sentences to compose and decompose compound sentences.
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.
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.
Inference in the Real World: Using Clues to Identify Key Details
Students will actively read as a critical component; they will infer in expository text.
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.