Choose Your Words Wisely!
Students will create a collection using objects, participate in a read-aloud, create another collection using sight word cards, and present their collections to the class.
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.
Rhyming is Out of This World!
Students will participate in stations with board games that reinforce rhyming, onset, and rimes, and blending.
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.
Are Letters Important?
Students will use alphabet cards to create consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words and encode and decode given CVC words.
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.
Reading Strategies: Choose, Monitor, and Comprehend with Nonfiction Texts
Students will engage in activities that allow them to take a book walk and use criteria to choose a good-fit book, use strategies to self-monitor their own comprehension while independently reading, and use partner talk criteria to reflect on their strategies collaboratively.
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.
My Version of the Three Little Pigs
Students will create their own version of "The Three Little Pigs" using story elements on a Beginning, Middle, End (BME) story map. First, students will draft their story map with detailed pictures in sequential order, and then go back and add their words later. Once their story is completed, students will be able to retell their story to peers and their teacher.
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.
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.