In this lesson, students analyze, rate, and revise questions generated in response to their reading of a short story. They use the questions in student-led conversations and activities, helping them understand the connection between strong questioning, inferring, and communicating during reading.

Students will critically think and communicate; they will summarize a text to understand and make connections to other texts, themselves, and the world.

Students assume roles of paragraph parts, including the main idea and supporting details, in order to reassemble a text that has been divided into pieces based on textual purpose.

Students participate in an activity where they must solve a crime. Students visit different stations that include surveillance tape, tips, eyewitness statements, and a crime scene. Each station is formatted as a different organizational pattern allowing students to practice creating summaries reflecting the structure used.

Students will create compound and complex sentences with proper comma usage and present their explanations to the class. 

Students will apply their analytical skills to different types of poems by reviewing the devices used in poetry, reading and analyzing two poems, and creating a poster to demonstrate their learning. 

Students explore and analyze how the author can achieve a specific purpose by using a variety of organizational patterns.

Students will read a text passage, looking for and highlighting key words that indicate the appropriate organizational pattern of the text.

Students describe a restaurant in restaurant review form using simple phrases and sentences. As they write, students focus on noun-adjective agreement and sentence structure.

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. 

Students will work collaboratively in groups as they practice their inferring skills using children’s literature books.

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.

This lesson is designed to teach students to synthesize and make connections between ideas within a text and with previous texts students have read.

Students will use Social Studies Weekly newspaper to make inferences about historical events using schema and text evidence.

Students will determine the important parts of a story and recognize and compose an individual summary by using color-coordinated sticky notes and the Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then (SWBST) strategy. Students will practice correctly identifying the parts of the SWBST strategy during a read-aloud. Students will work in groups and read a short story together, identify key components, and compose a written summary. Students will demonstrate their ability to recognize a good summary by writing two components of summarization on an exit ticket.

Students pretend to be detectives while being presented with various pictorial and textual clues that lead them to make an overall inference about what happened on Tuesday.

Engaging in a crime scene investigation, students will collaboratively examine the evidence, make inferences about their observations, and write a detailed description of the crime. Students will then read an informational text about investigating a crime scene and answer inference questions.

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.

Through the application of mentor text, various poetry, cooperative learning, self and peer-evaluation, and sound devices, students will build self-motivation to better appreciate and understand the author’s usage of sound devices in poetry.

Example of What Students Hear

Students will explore vocabulary words from other content areas and apply their learning of word parts to find meaning.

Students will actively read as a critical component; they will infer in expository text.