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.
Organized Authors: Name That Structure
Students will read a text passage, looking for and highlighting key words that indicate the appropriate organizational pattern of the text.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Creating Connections Across Literary Texts
Students will explore organizational patterns in short passages and use signal words/phrases as evidence to support the main idea and their understanding.
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.
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.
Understand New Vocabulary Using Roots and Affixes (English 6 Reading)
You will learn how to determine the meaning of grade-level academic English words derived from Latin, Greek, or other linguistic roots and affixes.
Understand New Vocabulary Within Context (English 6 Reading)
You will learn how to use context (e.g., cause and effect or compare and contrast organizational text structures) to determine or clarify the meaning of unfamiliar or multiple-meaning words.
Themes in Literary Texts (English 6 Reading)
You will learn how to infer the implicit theme in a work of fiction, distinguish theme from topic, and make complex inferences using textual evidence.
Imagery and Figurative Language
Using textual evidence, you will be able to explain how authors create meaning through stylistic elements and figurative language emphasizing the use of personification, hyperbole, and refrains in prose and poetry.
Literary Nonfiction
You will be able to identify the literary language and devices used in memoirs and personal narratives and compare their characteristics with those of an autobiography.
Summarize Informational/Expository Text (English 6 Reading)
You will learn how to summarize the main ideas and supporting details in text and understand that a summary does not include opinions.