Students will read a pre-Civil War speech and write author’s purpose statements using the argumentative verbs explain, urge, convince, and encourage.

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 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.

This lesson was intended to be delivered in a face-to-face classroom environment.  Due to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, this lesson has been modified from its original design to be executed in a virtual setting.

This virtual lesson was designed to prepare students to communicate familiar topics in the presentational writing mode in the target language.  Students will act as a college advisor and respond to a prospective student’s email regarding housing options.  Students will then peer evaluate each other’s writing and provide meaningful feedback using a rubric.

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

Students will make inferences about the author’s purpose after reading paired passages involving the same subject.

Students collaborate in small groups to discuss their peers’ poetry and assess the poetry according to the student-created rubric. The rubric assesses students’ ability to make meaningful connections to the poetic devices in their poetry. Through collaboration, they are building a culture of receptiveness among their peers.

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.

Click below to learn about the TEKS related to this unit. 

Students will evaluate a set of inferences to determine if they are valid or invalid and use text evidence to support their stance. The lesson incorporates best practices for English learners (ELs) and at-risk students such as the use of graphic organizers, anchor charts, and cooperative learning.  

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 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.

Students apply their understanding of the text in order to retell the plot sequence.
 

Students will observe the teacher sorting details that she read from a book about a dog. The teacher is making groups with the details and models her thinking. Students to help determine a title for each group. The students replicate that work in collaborative small groups using details they provided to the teacher after reading a book about the moon the previous day.

While “scooting” from one example to another, students will explore sentences in order to determine what end punctuation is necessary and why. Students will also collaborate to explore sentences in order to identify what edits are necessary and why.

Students will analyze multiple texts on the same topic to identify the text structures used and find each author’s purpose.