Get the Gist on the Main Idea
In this lesson, students use the Get the Gist Strategy to analyze text and identify the main idea. The lesson was designed with English learners in mind and utilizes strategies such as cooperative learning, visuals, graphic organizers, cloze reading, and sentence frames.
Crime Scene Investigations through Text Structures
Students participate in an activity where they must solve a crime. Students visit different stations that include surveillance tape, tips, eyewitness statements, and a crime scene. Each station is formatted as a different organizational pattern allowing students to practice creating summaries reflecting the structure used.
Critiquing and Creating Compound and Complex Sentences
Students will create compound and complex sentences with proper comma usage and present their explanations to the class.
Student work
Layers to Understanding Poetry
Students will apply their analytical skills to different types of poems by reviewing the devices used in poetry, reading and analyzing two poems, and creating a poster to demonstrate their learning.
The Next Steps to Great Writing
Students will write a draft that is sequenced and logical after brainstorming.
Teacher introducing 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.
Revision is in the Details
Students receive the same pre-generated sentence and discuss with a partner how to revise that sentence, adding details either by writing or drawing.
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
The Key to Key Signature
Students will review previous learning about half steps, whole steps, and enharmonics and will begin to learn the construction of tetrachords using the whole and half step sequence.
The "Moon" Idea
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.
Explore Revising and Editing with some Classroom Adventure
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.
Teachers during Introduction
Understanding Text Features
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.
Inference Detectives
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.
Civil War Inferring
Students will use Social Studies Weekly newspaper to make inferences about historical events using schema and text evidence.
Retelling Fiction with Logical Order
Students will be able to understand how to retell a fictional story in logical order using transitional words.
Sticky Note Summarizing
Students will determine the important parts of a story and recognize and compose an individual summary by using color-coordinated sticky notes and the Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then (SWBST) strategy. Students will practice correctly identifying the parts of the SWBST strategy during a read-aloud. Students will work in groups and read a short story together, identify key components, and compose a written summary. Students will demonstrate their ability to recognize a good summary by writing two components of summarization on an exit ticket.
One Thing Leads to Another
Students apply their understanding of the text in order to retell the plot sequence.
Put on Your Detective Cap: Making Inferences
Students pretend to be detectives while being presented with various pictorial and textual clues that lead them to make an overall inference about what happened on Tuesday.
Who Is the Culprit?
Engaging in a crime scene investigation, students will collaboratively examine the evidence, make inferences about their observations, and write a detailed description of the crime. Students will then read an informational text about investigating a crime scene and answer inference questions.