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.
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.
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.
Who is My Neighbor?
Students will make inferences using evidence gathered from a collection of objects and a text.
Retell Me Something Good!
Using previous knowledge of the story elements: characters, setting, problem, and solution, students will determine the key events of a story and logically sequence those events in order to create a retelling.
Reread, Revise, Revive!
Students will use the revision process to turn simple sentences into compound sentences.
Sound Effects, Poetic Elements, and Analysis, Oh My! Visualizing the Text to Gain Meaning Out of Poetry
Students will be asked to use metacognition as they analyze a poem, make inferences, and draw conclusions about the overall meaning of a text.
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.
Traditional vs. Contemporary: "The Three Little Pigs"
Students will compare a contemporary version of "The Three Little Pigs" to a traditional version with respect to characters, setting, and plot. In a small group, students will analyze story elements on a t-chart to determine which parts of the stories are the same and which are different.
Revision Rally
Students will use the ARMS (add, remove, move, and substitute words and phrases) revision strategy to revise a procedural passage.
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.
Too Hot for Main Idea
Students will collaborate and examine a reading passage to determine the topic and main idea of the passage.
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.
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.
Target 2% Lessons to Support Comprehension for Grades K through 5
These comprehension activities are designed to enhance the instruction of all teachers of reading and to meet the learning needs of all students, as indicated by data.