Organized Authors: Name That Structure
Students will read a text passage, looking for and highlighting key words that indicate the appropriate organizational pattern of the text.
Perfecting Percents
Students will engage in an activity that allows them to explore the different parts of percents: part, whole, and percent, and develop conceptual understanding of percents through the Concrete, Representational, Abstract (CRA) method of instruction.
Roll With It
Students will experience a hands-on lesson regarding ratios. While doing this, students will deepen their understanding of the concepts of ratios.
Intelligible Inferences
Students will work in cooperative learning groups that foster empathy to make inferences from pictures and text. They will discuss the differences between inferences made from pictures and inferences made from text.
Hopping into Real-World Ratios
Students will listen to a book read aloud called If You Hopped Like a Frog that introduces students to proportions. Students will then create word problems for the different animals and their proportions in the story.
Students will work collaboratively in a variety of stations using maps of Europe and North America to practice their map skills. They will apply their knowledge about data to create graphs.
Independent and Dependent Variable in Tables and Graphs
Students will use information in a real-world scenario to create a table or graph, translate the meaning of the table or graph, and identify the independent and dependent quantities.
A Trip to the Hospital
Students participate in a set of stations about the work done in different areas of a hospital. During each station, students revise paragraphs based on word choice, clarity, and transitions while also looking at introductions and adding or deleting sentences.
Creating Connections Across Literary Texts
Students will explore organizational patterns in short passages and use signal words/phrases as evidence to support the main idea and their understanding.
Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic Cells
Students will categorize cells as prokaryotic or eukaryotic by identifying the presence or lack of a nucleus.
What's going on with our plates?
The students will work collaboratively in small, ability-based groups in stations that will require them to use their academic vocabulary, academic language, and self-assessment to generate a product showing what they have learned.
Let's FIND Speed!
This research lesson requires students to distinguish between speed, distance, and time. Students will use formulas to calculate the three using a checklist. Students will also create their own speed, distance, or time word problem using the knowledge gained in this lesson.
Motion Pictures
In this lesson, students will be introduced to the concept of motion representation using distance vs. time graphs. Students will recognize labeling of axes, steepness related to speed, horizontal lines as non-motion, and downward slope as return to origin.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills Related to the Unit
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Earth: A Tilted Affair
After a brief review of direct and indirect sunlight, students will arrange heat maps and globes around a drawing of the Sun based on the tilt of Earth and how it affects Earth’s temperature.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Related to the Unit
Click below to learn about the TEKS related to this unit.
Students will create a bar graph representing data about China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, India, and the United States using information from a data bank. The data bank includes information on population, population density, gross domestic product, literacy rates, annual salary, infant mortality, and land area. Then, students will examine a light pollution map to make connections between the data presented and the bar graphs.
How Does the Cookie Crumble?
Students will self-discover how to multiply mixed numbers by using background knowledge of estimation, computations, and real world application of a recipe.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills Related to the Unit
In fifth grade, students will be able to multiply and divide whole numbers, which will lead into multiplication and division of decimals in sixth grade. That same year, they will model products and quotients of decimals to the hundredths place. This concrete model will lead them to a better understanding of the algorithm in fifth and sixth grade.
As fifth graders, students will model multiplication and division of a fraction and a whole number. The following year, students are expected to multiply and divide all types of fractions.
In addition, during sixth grade, students are introduced to integers (negative whole numbers) and will be able to model and solve all operations with integers. All of the skills previously stated will lead students to be able to perform all operations of rational numbers without models (positive and negative fractions, decimals, and whole numbers) in seventh grade.
Click below to learn more about the TEKS related to this unit. The highlighted standards have been chosen for this research lesson.
A Reader’s Survival Guide: Connecting and Synthesizing Ideas in Nonfiction Texts
This lesson is designed to teach students to synthesize and make connections between ideas within a text and with previous texts students have read.
Summarizing Fiction
Students will analyze effective and ineffective summaries of a fictional text and identify the characteristics that classify the summaries as either effective or ineffective.
Human Paragraphs
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.
Keep Your Balance!
Students are introduced to solving one-variable, one-step equations using addition and subtraction through models and hands-on activities. The students will learn the substitution method of checking answers.