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.
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
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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.
Catch Me If You Can—Retelling "The Gingerbread Man"
Students retell or re-enact events in sequence from "The Gingerbread Man" using pictures.
Diggin’ for Revisions
This lesson is focused on revising one sentence in isolation. The student and teacher choose a revision focus question before the lesson for the student to use as a guide for revising their sentence. Students provide feedback to their peers on how they could revise their sentence based on the selected focus question. Once feedback is completed, students begin revising their own sentence using toolboxes. At the end, students publish their revised sentence onto the online discussion tool and share out how they revised their sentence.
Inference Beyond a Text
Students will make inferences through workstations that allow them to work collaboratively and explore.