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.
Modeling and Solving Two-Step Equations
Students will use various materials to create models of two-step equations. Then, they will take an equation, create their own model, and solve for the variable from the model.
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Equations and Inequalities
Using a graphic organizer, students will write and solve a one-variable, two-step equation using the distributive property. They also will draw a picture and justify their solution.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment
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Does Paper Have Volume?
Students will be involved in a problem-solving lesson to determine if paper has volume, find the volume of a piece of paper and a ream of paper, and determine how many pieces of paper will fit inside their classroom.
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Discovering the Ratio of Pi
Students will discover the ratio of pi by relating the circumference to the diameter of various circles. Students will use this ratio to approximate the formulas for circumference.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment
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Volume of Triangular Prisms
Students will use hands-on manipulatives to discover the connection between the shape of the base and the height to determine the volume of a prism.
Evaluating Inferences
Students will evaluate a set of inferences to determine if they are valid or invalid and use text evidence to support their stance. The lesson incorporates best practices for English learners (ELs) and at-risk students such as the use of graphic organizers, anchor charts, and cooperative learning.
Remembering Leaders
Students will read expository text, categorize findings, and reformulate the text into an obituary.
Teacher poised for modeling
Compound Probability: Independent vs. Dependent Events
Students will review steps for solving compound probability problems through an activity involving doughnuts. Students will then determine the difference between independent and dependent events through compound probability task cards. To encourage students to work through their struggle, students will rate themselves on a scale measuring effort and achievement at the end of the lesson.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment
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Santa Timeline Breakout
Students collaborate and critically-think to analyze resources from informational texts of various disciplines and unlock a breakout box. Once the box is unlocked, students receive a final text to summarize.
Exploring Number Sense
Students will use manipulatives and a number path to identify numbers one less than or more than a given number.
Students Working in Their Group
Paired Passages with a Purpose
Students will make inferences about the author’s purpose after reading paired passages involving the same subject.
Are You Speaking Greek?
Students will be able to determine the meaning of words using Greek, Latin, or other linguistic roots and affixes.
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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Can You Summarize?
Students will work with partners, as well as independently, to create and evaluate summaries of expository text.
The Golden Touch
Students will practice using a protocol to create a summary of an expository text.
Poetry With Purpose
Students collaborate in small groups to discuss their peers’ poetry and assess the poetry according to the student-created rubric. The rubric assesses students’ ability to make meaningful connections to the poetic devices in their poetry. Through collaboration, they are building a culture of receptiveness among their peers.
Catch Me If You Can—Retelling "The Gingerbread Man"
Students retell or re-enact events in sequence from "The Gingerbread Man" using pictures.
Making Inferences and Drawing Conclusions in an Anne Frank Digital Challenge
Students will work collaboratively on a digital challenge activity by reading short excerpts of nonfiction text and explore an online webpage where they will learn more about the life of Anne Frank and the World War II era. By answering inferential and organizational structure questions, regarding those topics, students will be in a race against each other to crack the code to a lockbox.
Comparing Box Plots and Dot Plots
This lesson is a 90-minute lesson that can be delivered in one block or split into two 45 minute lessons. The first part of the lesson engages students in a notice/wonder activity that is designed to help students begin to question how data is represented in box plots and dot plots. The second part of the lesson is designed for students to compare data in box plots and dot plots and identify truths and untruths about the representations.