Rhyming is Out of This World!
Students will participate in stations with board games that reinforce rhyming, onset, and rimes, and blending.
Super Sequencing Strategies
Students will explore the informational text structure of sequencing in multiple contexts, as a reader and a writer, in order to improve their comprehension of informational text and their ability to analyze the author’s purpose. They will make connections between sequencing and events in their everyday life and use pictures and time order words to write their own informational text using sequencing.
Product and Quotient Properties of Exponents
This lesson helps students understand two foundational exponential properties: The Product and Quotient Properties of Exponents. Students will collaborate to formulate a rule for these properties. Ultimately, students should conclude that when the same bases are being multiplied, exponents will be added; and when the same bases are being divided, exponents will be subtracted. As the lesson progresses, students will apply these rules to simplify expressions of various difficulties.
As students rotate through learning stations, they analyze the Magna Carta, Mayflower Compact, and the English Bill of Rights. Students interpret the historical documents and draw conclusions as to how these docuemnts have influenced the U.S. system of government.
Giving Meaning to Multiple Meaning Words
In this lesson, students identify and use keywords in a paragraph to infer the relevant meaning of multiple-meaning words. Students build a deep understanding of words by creating semantic maps that show relationships among words. The lesson was designed with English learners in mind and utilizes instructional strategies such as cooperative learning, visuals, graphic organizers, and sentence frames.
Introduction to Character Foils
During this lesson, students will view video clips and read texts that have character foils examples. Students will complete a graphic organizer with evidence that supports their identification of foil characters. Once complete, students will use the information from the graphic organizer to discuss character foils.
Let's Analyze and Compute Fractions!
Students will compare fractions with unlike denominators to determine whether a given answer to a real-world problem is correct using context and computational skills.
Retelling with Confidence
Students learn how to use the pictures in their books to retell a story in sequence. The teacher models how to use the pictures to retell the story Stellaluna by Janell Cannon. The students and teacher complete a graphic organizer using picture representations from the book. The graphic organizer is a frame for all the elements of a strong retell and requires students to include new vocabulary; the characters and setting; and the beginning, middle, and end of the book, Stellaluna. Students will apply the picture retell strategy by completing a graphic organizer for their own book and retelling the story to peers and their teacher.
Conversations in Art
In this lesson, students will learn the critique process using description, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation. Students will create an evaluation of artwork using the critique process and communicate their understanding through written responses and discourse.
Author’s Purpose: Reading for Meaning
In this lesson, students use text evidence and background knowledge to generate and evaluate inferences about the author's purpose for specific sections of a passage as well as the entire passage. The lesson is designed with English learners (ELs) and students from families that speak nonstandard dialects of English in mind. The lesson provides scaffolded instruction through the use of strategies designed to make input comprehensible: visuals, graphic organizers, sentence frames, hand gestures, and collaborative learning.
Growing Our Vocabulary Goals
Students will use a variety of vocabulary strategies to apply their knowledge of unknown and multiple-meaning words.
Metacognitive Approaches to Student-based Learning
In this lesson, students will learn how to make complex inferences and draw conclusions about a work of literary fiction using a combination of text evidence and background knowledge. Using a graphic organizer and a short story, students will record both text evidence and their prior knowledge, and combine these elements to make an inference about the character.
2 Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment: Administering and Interpreting Results
This binder details how to score and interpret the results of the Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment (TMSFA). This course is Unit 4 of the Texas Adolescent Literacy Academy (TALA). These materials are available for view only; no credit or certificate is provided.
Lines of Symmetry
Students will work collaboratively with a partner to discover what is a line of symmetry.
Fractions with Multi-Step Problems
Students will be able to work collaboratively while baking to find the least common multiples of fractions with unlike denominators and create equivalent fractions, then add or subtract.
Circuit Designers
Students will work in small groups of two to three on a structured challenge around circuits which includes requirements such as including using a switch or a conductor. They will then use that knowledge to work on a collaborative challenge to solve a relevant problem related to elephant poaching. Students will create a containment system that will have an alarm system, a lighting system, and a way to pass through. Finally, they will review the other projects and discuss similarities and differences in the design.
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.
Word problems, models and more!
The students will engage in group activities to solve word problems with and without models as well as writing equations.
Analyzing the Text for Summary and Connections
Students will critically think and communicate; they will summarize a text to understand and make connections to other texts, themselves, and the world.
Revising for Coherence
Students will use a checklist to peer edit a composition. They will check for coherence through the proper use of transition words and conjunctions.