Writing Summaries with Get the Gist
This lesson teaches students to use the Get the Gist strategy to find the main idea of a section. Students will then put those Get the Gist statements together to begin a written summary of their text.
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.
Analyzing Context Clues to Understand the Meaning of a Word
Students will focus on context clues in a vocabulary lesson.
Cause and Effect: The Story of Wangari Maathai
Students will be able to identify cause and effect relationships using an expository text.
Una Reseña de un Restaurante
Students describe a restaurant in restaurant review form using simple phrases and sentences. As they write, students focus on noun-adjective agreement and sentence structure.
The Bucket Brigade
In this lesson, students rotate to various learning stations and work with a partner to complete tasks that require them to generate inferences, infer the theme of short reading passages, write personal narratives or stories that exemplify a selected theme, and develop Tier Two high utility vocabulary. The lesson incorporates best practices for English learners (ELs) and at-risk students such as the use of collaborative learning, graphic organizers, anchor charts, and technology applications.
"C" to the "E" Can't Conquer Me
Students will explore cause and effect relationships by creating different representations of a cause or an effect from a given scenario.
Teacher introducing lesson
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.
Write, Revise, Repeat!
Students develop their perseverance skills as they continue to revise their writing for coherence. The teacher focuses on providing students with three tools to develop the students’ paragraphs for sentence-to-sentence connectedness and clarity.
Inferring the Message in Poems
Students look for meaning in poems using poetry tools and work in groups to identify how parts of poems fit together to give a message. They then independently infer the message from a poem their teacher reads.
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
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.
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
Tackling Expository Text
The students will read and summarize expository text using a graphic organizer to aid the process.
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
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.
Informational Inferences
In learning stations, students use textual evidence and personal schema to identify and generate inferences, to support understanding of an expository text.
Did this make this happen? Is this why this happened? All About Cause and Effect Relationships
Students will use a mentor text to identify cause and effect relationships. Students will also find the missing cause or effect. They will work collaboratively to complete a graphic organizer and use teacher-created anchor charts to help them in identifying the relationships.