Students will critically think and communicate; they will summarize a text to understand and make connections to other texts, themselves, and the world.

Students will use a checklist to peer edit a composition. They will check for coherence through the proper use of transition words and conjunctions.

Students will work collaboratively to infer the implied meaning of a metaphor used in a poem. Students will complete a graphic organizer in which they discuss with their peers the two items being compared in the metaphor, write and illustrate the literal meaning of each word being compared, and use this information to infer the implied meaning of the metaphor. The lesson has a strong focus on vocabulary development and is designed with English learners (ELs) in mind.  
 

Students receive the same pre-generated sentence and discuss with a partner how to revise that sentence, adding details either by writing or drawing. 

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.
 

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.

Students will be able to understand vowel digraphs (ai/ay pattern).

Students will discover and use knowledge of Greek and Latin roots to determine the meaning of unknown words.

Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment

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Students will apply revision strategies to mentor texts. They also will have the opportunity to create a new book.

In this lesson, students will expand their critical thinking skills by making inferences found in a short film and listening to a literary fictional text on tablets. Working collaboratively in groups, students will create anchor charts to demonstrate their understanding of making inferences and present their detailed anchor charts to their classmates. 

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.

Students compare deep reading with an iceberg. Instruction focuses on teaching students’ close reading and annotation skills and increasing agency as students dive into informational text. Students are empowered through conversations, tech tools, and co-creation of criteria to read deeply.

Students will work collaboratively in groups as they practice their inferring skills using children’s literature books.

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.

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.

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Students will participate in a workshop-style lesson that includes partner and small-group work, teacher modeling, and independent reflection to not only label and identify text features within informational text, but to also connect the feature to its purpose.

Students will create compound sentences from simple sentences.

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. 

This lesson guides students to use sentence stems to clarify their thinking as they identify and locate text features in isolation while using an interactive text features wall. Students will then transition to gaining information from text features as they search for text features in their books and share the information gained with their partners.  

Students will work together and problem-solve in a timed breakout session to gather clues and answer questions involving cause-and-effect, sequential, and comparative relationships in text. 

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.

Students will use mystery bags and graphic organizers to identify clues and use their schema to make an inference. Students conclude this lesson by connecting text as evidence and playing a context clue game with cucumber sentences.