Stellar Sentences
Students will read a group of words, arrange them to make sense as a complete thought, and recognize and use capitalization at the beginning and a period as the ending punctuation mark.
Locating Facts and Details in Text Features
First-grade students will rotate through engaging learning stations and read portions of expository texts to identify facts and details embedded within text features.
Teaming up with Transitions
Students participate in an activity where they must link cause and effect statements using transition words. The lesson is designed with English learners in mind, and it includes instructional strategies designed to provide comprehensible input, such as visuals and collaborative learning.
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.
One Thing Leads to Another
Students apply their understanding of the text in order to retell the plot sequence.
Adventures in Inferring
Students will infer the message the author is trying to convey using schema and evidence from the text. Readers use this strategy, known as making inferences, to think about what they are reading.
Students progress from a surface-level understanding of text to a deeper understanding by processing and expressing details and examples to support their understanding of observations through background knowledge and textual evidence.
Click below to learn about the TEKS related to this unit.
Planning a Draft
Students will employ critical thinking skills to order details logically and become more effective at communicating their ideas to readers. The lesson will guide students toward using critical thinking in the planning phase of drafting to purposefully include details that interest readers.
Journalists Research, Too!
Students will research information in order to create a newspaper article about the topic.
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.
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.
Sensing Poetry
Students locate sensory details and create their own sensory detail poem.
Using Captions to Infer
The students will be shown a picture with a caption. The students will partner up and discuss what they see and have read in the caption. The students must make an inference based off of the evidence and write an inference statement. Students will upload image and inference statements to a class sharing app for others to read and comment on.
Inferences with Wolfie and Dot
In this lesson, students use text evidence and background knowledge to make inferences. Students infer during each phase of the lesson using a variety of literary sources and activities.
It’s More Than Just Sounding It Out
Students will be able to understand vowel digraphs (ai/ay pattern).
Discovering the Power of a Complete Sentence
Students will discover the necessary components of a complete sentence and use the complete subject and complete predicate in their own writing through a process called ratiocination.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment
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.
Fun with First Drafts
The lesson will support students’ writing a first draft of a personal narrative story by providing opportunities to listen to their previously recorded story, review their (graphic organizer) draft web, and add sticky notes with further details to their webs.
Tone is in the Fear of the Beholder: Reading and Writing Using Multimodal Mentor Texts
This resource is a demonstration lesson presented at the 2014 Write for Texas Summer Institute. It provides a snapshot of a four to five week unit that engages students in the reading and writing workshop model.
Building Blocks for Teaching Adolescents with Reading Difficulties
This online resource is designed to enhance teachers’ knowledge and skills so they can effectively teach adolescent students who struggle with reading.
Teaching Sentence Skills
This resource series is designed to enhance teachers' knowledge and skill so they can effectively teach grammar in context. Teaching grammar in context uses powerful models like sentences within mentor texts, rather than marking errors and correcting weak or wrong examples.
Texas Adolescent Literacy Academy Administrator Overview
The Texas Adolescent Academy Administrator Overview is designed to prepare school leaders to implement a schoolwide approach to reading intervention consistent with a response to intervention, or RtI, model.