Consonant Blends
Students will focus on initial blends using multiple opportunities for multisensory responses to recognize, sort, and blend sounds.
Crime Scene Inferences
In learning stations, students use textual evidence and personal schema to generate inferences, make generalizations, and draw conclusions to support understanding about expository text.
Planning a Draft
Students will employ critical thinking skills to order details logically and become more effective at communicating their ideas to readers. The lesson will guide students toward using critical thinking in the planning phase of drafting to purposefully include details that interest readers.
Pack Your Bags!
Students learn to determine the difference between topic, central idea, and details using mystery bags, graphic organizers, and short passages.
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.
The Characteristics of the Mystery Letter "H"
Students will identify and apply characteristics of an alphabetical letter (mystery letter Hh) through various hands-on activities and cooperative group work.
Adventures in Inferring
Students will infer the message the author is trying to convey using schema and evidence from the text. Readers use this strategy, known as making inferences, to think about what they are reading.
Students progress from a surface-level understanding of text to a deeper understanding by processing and expressing details and examples to support their understanding of observations through background knowledge and textual evidence.
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Character Traits
Students will be able to identify characters, their traits, and the reason for their actions.
Summarizing Expository Text
The students will watch the teacher model how to create a summary, and then work in groups to create a summary from an expository text.
Teacher with students in small group
Remembering Leaders
Students will read expository text, categorize findings, and reformulate the text into an obituary.
Teacher poised for modeling
Author’s Purpose in a Bag
Students will infer from text evidence the author’s purpose and explain their thinking.
Are You Speaking Greek?
Students will be able to determine the meaning of words using Greek, Latin, or other linguistic roots and affixes.
Revising Sentences
Students will revise a simple sentence by copying it on a series of sticky notes and adding new words using glitter pens and star-shaped sticky notes.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment
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Rhyming with Visuals
The teacher will model how to recognize rhyming words by hearing them, seeing them, reading them, and writing them. Then the students will practice hearing, seeing, reading, and writing “at” word family words.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Related to the Unit
This unit connects to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) by fostering a continuance in the area of phonological awareness as begun in previous lessons and introducing the exploration of nursery rhymes, poetry, and lullabies through literature and language play.
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My Version of the Three Little Pigs
Students will create their own version of "The Three Little Pigs" using story elements on a Beginning, Middle, End (BME) story map. First, students will draft their story map with detailed pictures in sequential order, and then go back and add their words later. Once their story is completed, students will be able to retell their story to peers and their teacher.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment
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.
Making Inferences to Solve a Mystery
In learning stations, students use textual evidence and personal schema to make inferences and draw conclusions about the structure and elements of poetry, and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding.
Spying Evidence Through Text
Students will identify ideas in a text that are important to its meaning and write a letter demonstrating their understanding of the text.
Research Lesson TEKS
Text Feature Fun!
Students will locate and identify text features in non-fiction books while matching the purpose to the appropriate text feature.
Earth Day: Join the Fight, for Sentences That are Right!
In this lesson, students are initially captivated by Earth Day-themed pictures, thus providing them with ideas to prewrite, and will have meaningful writing to revise. The lesson utilizes a mentor text to demonstrate the necessity of subjects and predicates. Students apply their knowledge of sentence syntax by revising a chosen sentence and rewriting the sentence to be shared with the class during a gallery walk.
Character Analysis: Traits, Relationships, and Beyond
The students will be guided through exploring how actions affect characters and their decisions. Students will put themselves in the shoes of a character and think about how they feel and why.