Rhyming is Out of This World!
Students will participate in stations with board games that reinforce rhyming, onset, and rimes, and blending.
What’s Your Feature?
Students will learn how to use text features to locate information and verify answers within an expository text.
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.
Teacher reviewing vocabulary words.
Revising and Editing Escape Room
Students will collaboratively apply revising and editing skills to make their way through passages and a series of questions to decode a lock. If groups successfully complete the tasks, they will escape the room and win a prize.
Syncing with Inferences
In this lesson, students integrate relevant text evidence and background knowledge to generate valid inferences when reading a historical fiction text. The lesson was designed with English learners in mind, so it includes instructional strategies designed to make linguistic and content input comprehensible: a focus on vocabulary, visuals, cooperative learning, anchor charts, graphic organizers, and sentence stems/frames.
Figuring out Figurative Language
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.
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.
Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences With Expository Text
Third grade students will identify and discuss facts and details from expository text and draw conclusions using textual evidence in learning stations.
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.
Analyzing Author’s Purpose: Argumentative Text
Students will read a pre-Civil War speech and write author’s purpose statements using the argumentative verbs explain, urge, convince, and encourage.
Teacher in Action
Bulldogs “Paws” for a Good Summary
This lesson helps students summarize information in expository text using logical order. The lesson begins with students using a T-chart to categorize information as they summarize a text. By the end of the lesson, students will independently summarize information. As students transition through activities in the lesson, they will work both in groups and independently using a variety of best practices and a checklist to heighten intrinsic motivation, increasing chances for success.
Author’s Purpose: Reading for Meaning
In this lesson, students use text evidence and background knowledge to generate and evaluate inferences about the author's purpose for specific sections of a passage as well as the entire passage. The lesson is designed with English learners (ELs) and students from families that speak nonstandard dialects of English in mind. The lesson provides scaffolded instruction through the use of strategies designed to make input comprehensible: visuals, graphic organizers, sentence frames, hand gestures, and collaborative learning.
2 Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment: Administering and Interpreting Results
This binder details how to score and interpret the results of the Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment (TMSFA). This course is Unit 4 of the Texas Adolescent Literacy Academy (TALA). These materials are available for view only; no credit or certificate is provided.
What Can You Infer?
Students will learn how to use textual evidence to make inferences and to support their understanding.
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.
Welcome to the Jungle!
This lesson offers an engaging format for fourth graders to spend time working with different cause-and-effect situations and text to help move them toward the objective of correctly identifying an implicit cause-and-effect relationship within a text.
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.
Painting With Expository Writing
After students examine an image by Faith Ringgold, they will write supporting sentences when given a central idea sentence.
Text Features are a Bear
Students are expected to work with partners and then in groups to complete a text feature (scavenger) hunt activity using the same nonfiction text.
Summarizing with Sarah at the ER
The purpose of this lesson is to sequence the events of a story chronologically and be able to summarize the major events.
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.
Mapping Out Our Learning
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.