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.
Exploring Identity and Diving Deep into the Complex Meaning of Poetry
This lesson is designed to teach students to make complex inferences, choose specific text evidence that strongly supports the inference, and develop a coherent explanation of how the evidence strongly supports the validity of the idea within the genre of poetry.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Related to the Unit
Click below to learn about the TEKS related to this unit.
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
How Does the Cookie Crumble?
Students will self-discover how to multiply mixed numbers by using background knowledge of estimation, computations, and real world application of a recipe.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills Related to the Unit
In fifth grade, students will be able to multiply and divide whole numbers, which will lead into multiplication and division of decimals in sixth grade. That same year, they will model products and quotients of decimals to the hundredths place. This concrete model will lead them to a better understanding of the algorithm in fifth and sixth grade.
As fifth graders, students will model multiplication and division of a fraction and a whole number. The following year, students are expected to multiply and divide all types of fractions.
In addition, during sixth grade, students are introduced to integers (negative whole numbers) and will be able to model and solve all operations with integers. All of the skills previously stated will lead students to be able to perform all operations of rational numbers without models (positive and negative fractions, decimals, and whole numbers) in seventh grade.
Click below to learn more about the TEKS related to this unit. The highlighted standards have been chosen for this research lesson.
Using Measures of Center and Spread to Summarize Data
Students will be able to use the measures of center and spread of a set of data to make summary statements regarding the applications of the data.
Independent and Dependent Variable in Tables and Graphs
Students will use information in a real-world scenario to create a table or graph, translate the meaning of the table or graph, and identify the independent and dependent quantities.
Teacher doing Introduction
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
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.
Proving Triangles Congruent Using the Side-Side-Side and Side-Angle-Side Postulates
Students will prove: Two triangles are congruent using the Side-Side-Side (SSS) and Side-Angle-Side (SAS) postulates.
Teacher giving instructions
Modeling and Solving Inequalities Using Multiplication and Division
Students will work collaboratively to model and solve inequalities of real-life situations.
Teacher giving instructions
Hopping into Real-World Ratios
Students will listen to a book read aloud called If You Hopped Like a Frog that introduces students to proportions. Students will then create word problems for the different animals and their proportions in the story.
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
Square Root Regression
This lesson is a student discovery lesson that culminates in square root regression with technology. Students will use their study of inverses, the relationship between quadratic and square root functions, their previous knowledge of regression, and determine how to find the square root regression of real-world data.
Identifying Key Features of Quadratic Functions
The students will be able to graph quadratic functions using key attributes of quadratic equations.