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.
Be an Editing Star with Checklists and TPR!
Students review editing marks using TPR (Total Physical Response), while listening to a reading of a mentor text. Next, students use a brief procedural composition to edit for punctuation, capitalization, commas, and complete sentences. Students also use a checklist to edit a peer’s writing.
Teaching Text Features of Elephant Proportions
Using a graphic organizer, students will collaboratively use text features to analyze an expository text. Students will locate information from the text to extract meaning and understanding about a topic.
Empowered by the Evidence: Making Inferences with Confidence
A mini-lesson on how to select the best text evidence to support an inference or draw a conclusion is presented. Teachers use the think-aloud method to model how to use a checklist in order to identify the strongest support provided in the text. Students are then asked to work with a group to discuss and support a given conclusion drawn from a self-chosen text. They are encouraged to use the checklist to ensure the best evidence is identified
Too Hot for Main Idea
Students will collaborate and examine a reading passage to determine the topic and main idea of the passage.
Teacher Introducing Lesson
Building Vocabulary with a Morphing Mindset
Students will explore vocabulary words from other content areas and apply their learning of word parts to find meaning.
Teacher working with students
One Step at a Time: A Lesson on Writing Procedural Text and the Power of Revising!
This lesson is designed to help young writers develop confidence in their writing abilities while being encouraged to edit and revise. Writers should develop revision skills to include detailed description while writing procedural text.
A Trip to the Hospital
Students participate in a set of stations about the work done in different areas of a hospital. During each station, students revise paragraphs based on word choice, clarity, and transitions while also looking at introductions and adding or deleting sentences.
Stop, Collaborate, and Listen. Poetry is Our Mission! Thinking Deeply About Poetry
Students will actively engage with poetry in a blend of collaborative and independent analysis of poetic devices and an author’s use of devices to communicate a deeper meaning. Students will use their analysis to infer the meaning of a variety of poems.
Tic-Tac-Toe Text Features
Students will participate in a scavenger hunt and will be given a tic-tac-toe grid with clues about specific text features. The students will use the clues to locate specific information in the text.
What Does the “Text Feature” Say?
Students will apply knowledge of text features to locate information in specific text to help better understand what they are reading.
Teacher reviews text features with the class
Putting the Pieces Together
Students will use what they have learned about text features and the Answer—Cite—Explain (ACE) strategy, to infer meaning from nonfiction text.
Retell Cafe
The lesson requires students to retell events of fictional stories in a logical order. Students work independently and in cooperative groups using manipulatives and a hands-on approach to sequence events in a story.
A Case of Character Traits
In literacy stations, students will describe how Camilla Cream’s internal and external character traits, motivations, and feelings changed throughout the fictional text, A Bad Case of Stripes.
Sound Detectives
Through the application of mentor text, various poetry, cooperative learning, self and peer-evaluation, and sound devices, students will build self-motivation to better appreciate and understand the author’s usage of sound devices in poetry.
Example of What Students Hear
Vocabulary Detectives
Students will be actively engaged in working on a Frayer Model to determine the definition of a vocabulary word, using the word in the correct context in a sentence, drawing an illustration of the word, and providing non-examples of the word. Through this activity they will be thinking critically, collaborating, as well as monitoring their own learning, as they are modeling their own understanding of an unfamiliar vocabulary word.
Reread, Revise, Revive!
Students will use the revision process to turn simple sentences into compound sentences.
Who is My Neighbor?
Students will make inferences using evidence gathered from a collection of objects and a text.
Teacher going through description of inferring
Summarizing Fiction
Students will analyze effective and ineffective summaries of a fictional text and identify the characteristics that classify the summaries as either effective or ineffective.
Teacher giving task
Can You Prove It Detective?
In this lesson, the students will locate facts that are stated in a nonfiction text. The students will also learn how to locate facts within a fictional text.