Text Evidence and the Moral Lesson
Teacher will read How Spiders Got Eight Legs as a read-aloud. Students will write notes about what they think the moral is. Students will collaborate in groups to determine what they think the moral lesson is. Students will reread, highlight, and write the text evidence that identifies the moral lesson.
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.
Connecting Author’s Purpose and Organizational Patterns
Students explore and analyze how the author can achieve a specific purpose by using a variety of organizational patterns.
Quality Questioning
In this lesson, students analyze, rate, and revise questions generated in response to their reading of a short story. They use the questions in student-led conversations and activities, helping them understand the connection between strong questioning, inferring, and communicating during reading.
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.
Students working
Retelling Fiction with Logical Order
Students will be able to understand how to retell a fictional story in logical order using transitional words.
Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment (TMSFA)
Texas Education Code (TEC) §28.006(c-1) requires that students who do not meet the passing standard on the Grade 6 State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) reading test must be administered a reading assessment at the beginning of grade 7. The Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment (TMSFA) was developed with Texas students to be a valid and reliable instrument for determining students’ areas of instructional need.
The TMSFA is based on valid and reliable scientific research, thoroughly measures each domain of development, and is user-friendly. The following three domains of development are assessed using the TMSFA.
- Text Comprehension (Reading)
- Word Analysis
- Fluency
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.
Moving Beyond P. I. E.
In this lesson, students infer the author’s purpose of selected paragraphs of expository text. The lesson is designed with English learners in mind and utilizes instructional strategies designed to scaffold instruction such as collaborative learning strategies, student generated questions, anchor charts, and sentence frames to facilitate oral responses.
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.
Remembering Leaders
Students will read expository text, categorize findings, and reformulate the text into an obituary.
Teacher poised for modeling
Are You Speaking Greek?
Students will be able to determine the meaning of words using Greek, Latin, or other linguistic roots and affixes.
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.
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.
Students working on poster
Super Sleuths SIP on Vocabulary: Using Sentences, Illustrations, and Prefixes/Suffixes to Make Meaning
Students will learn strategies to find the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary words using the acronym SIP (sentence, illustration, prefixes/suffixes).
Catch Me If You Can—Retelling "The Gingerbread Man"
Students retell or re-enact events in sequence from "The Gingerbread Man" using pictures.
The Golden Touch
Students will practice using a protocol to create a summary of an expository text.
Can You Summarize?
Students will work with partners, as well as independently, to create and evaluate summaries of expository text.
Author’s Purpose, Text Features, Informational Text, and Daily Three
Students will follow the Daily Three structure to engage in mini-lessons regarding author’s purpose, text features, guided reading, work on writing, read to self, and word work. The students will also infer the author’s purpose for writing a book using a book order form.