Students learn how to use the pictures in their books to retell a story in sequence. The teacher models how to use the pictures to retell the story Stellaluna by Janell Cannon. The students and teacher complete a graphic organizer using picture representations from the book. The graphic organizer is a frame for all the elements of a strong retell and requires students to include new vocabulary; the characters and setting; and the beginning, middle, and end of the book, Stellaluna. Students will apply the picture retell strategy by completing a graphic organizer for their own book and retelling the story to peers and their teacher.

In this lesson, students use text evidence and background knowledge to generate and evaluate inferences about the author's purpose for specific sections of a passage as well as the entire passage. The lesson is designed with English learners (ELs) and students from families that speak nonstandard dialects of English in mind. The lesson provides scaffolded instruction through the use of strategies designed to make input comprehensible: visuals, graphic organizers, sentence frames, hand gestures, and collaborative learning.

In this lesson, students rotate to various learning stations and work with a partner to complete tasks that require them to generate inferences, infer the theme of short reading passages, write personal narratives or stories that exemplify a selected theme, and develop Tier Two high utility vocabulary. The lesson incorporates best practices for English learners (ELs) and at-risk students such as the use of collaborative learning, graphic organizers, anchor charts, and technology applications.

Students will be able to understand vowel digraphs (ai/ay pattern).

This lesson offers an engaging format for fourth graders to spend time working with different cause-and-effect situations and text to help move them toward the objective of correctly identifying an implicit cause-and-effect relationship within a text.

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.

Third grade students will identify and discuss facts and details from expository text and draw conclusions using textual evidence in learning stations.

Students will observe the teacher sorting details that she read from a book about a dog. The teacher is making groups with the details and models her thinking. Students to help determine a title for each group. The students replicate that work in collaborative small groups using details they provided to the teacher after reading a book about the moon the previous day.

Students are expected to work with partners and then in groups to complete a text feature (scavenger) hunt activity using the same nonfiction text.

While “scooting” from one example to another, students will explore sentences in order to determine what end punctuation is necessary and why. Students will also collaborate to explore sentences in order to identify what edits are necessary and why.

In this lesson, students integrate background knowledge and textual clues to respond to inferential questions that were generated by the students themselves. The lesson utilizes instructional strategies that have been identified as best practice for teaching inference such as: generating questions, identifying keywords, and activating prior knowledge. Additionally, the lesson is designed to support English learners and utilizes visuals, graphic organizers, sentence frames, and cooperative learning.

Students will learn how to use text features to locate information and verify answers within an expository text.  

Students will read a group of words, arrange them to make sense as a complete thought,  and recognize and use capitalization at the beginning and a period as the ending punctuation mark.

Students will research information in order to create a newspaper article about the topic.

First-grade students will rotate through engaging learning stations and read portions of expository texts to identify facts and details embedded within text features.

Students receive the same pre-generated sentence and discuss with a partner how to revise that sentence, adding details either by writing or drawing. 

In this lesson, students integrate relevant text evidence and background knowledge to generate valid inferences when reading a historical fiction text. The lesson was designed with English learners in mind, so it includes instructional strategies designed to make linguistic and content input comprehensible: a focus on vocabulary, visuals, cooperative learning, anchor charts, graphic organizers, and sentence stems/frames.

The teacher will engage the students to make inferences through visuals, pictures, and informational text using problem-solving and self-questioning strategies.

This lesson guides students to use sentence stems to clarify their thinking as they identify and locate text features in isolation while using an interactive text features wall. Students will then transition to gaining information from text features as they search for text features in their books and share the information gained with their partners.  

Students will use mystery bags and graphic organizers to identify clues and use their schema to make an inference. Students conclude this lesson by connecting text as evidence and playing a context clue game with cucumber sentences.