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.
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.
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.
Analyzing Online Sources for Credibility
The students will analyze online sources for credibility and reliability while respecting others opinions through collaboration.
Catch Me If You Can—Retelling "The Gingerbread Man"
Students retell or re-enact events in sequence from "The Gingerbread Man" using pictures.
It’s All in the Details
This lesson demonstrates a small group intervention that scaffolds instruction of main idea for native English or Spanish speaking students. This lesson is scripted in both languages.
Sound Effects, Poetic Elements, and Analysis, Oh My! Visualizing the Text to Gain Meaning Out of Poetry
Students will be asked to use metacognition as they analyze a poem, make inferences, and draw conclusions about the overall meaning of a text.
Stop, Collaborate, and Listen. Poetry is Our Mission! Thinking Deeply About Poetry
Students will actively engage with poetry in a blend of collaborative and independent analysis of poetic devices and an author’s use of devices to communicate a deeper meaning. Students will use their analysis to infer the meaning of a variety of poems.
Building Vocabulary with a Morphing Mindset
Students will explore vocabulary words from other content areas and apply their learning of word parts to find meaning.
Teacher working with students
Sound Detectives
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
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
Synthesizing and Making Connections—Socratic Style
Students will show understanding of expository text and be able to collaborate with peers to provide evidence of their understanding.
Reread, Revise, Revive!
Students will use the revision process to turn simple sentences into compound sentences.