What's in a Name?
Students will participate in hands-on activities to extend their knowledge of the parts of speech.
Sparking Curiosity and Wonder: Making Complex Inferences
Students will learn how to activate their curiosity and use questioning strategies to make complex inferences and connections across texts.
Civil War Inferring
Students will use Social Studies Weekly newspaper to make inferences about historical events using schema and text evidence.
Diving Deeper: Using Text Evidence to Support Inferences
Students learn new ways to evaluate their thinking when making local and global inferences and justifying their validity.
Investigating Cause and Effect Through the Lens of the Alamo
This lesson is structured as a gradual release model of cause and effect. Students start by identifying cause and effect within a sentence, then progress to paragraphs, and finally finding cause and effect relationships on a given page in the book. This lesson integrates fourth-grade social studies standards with a text about the Alamo.
Sticky Note Summarizing
Students will determine the important parts of a story and recognize and compose an individual summary by using color-coordinated sticky notes and the Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then (SWBST) strategy. Students will practice correctly identifying the parts of the SWBST strategy during a read-aloud. Students will work in groups and read a short story together, identify key components, and compose a written summary. Students will demonstrate their ability to recognize a good summary by writing two components of summarization on an exit ticket.
Morphology Mania
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
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.
Write Right
This research lesson encourages students to become better illustrators and authors. Students will work in collaborative groups and independently to develop drafts.
The Battle Between Editing and Revising
Students will apply revision strategies to mentor texts. They also will have the opportunity to create a new book.
Escribir una carta persuasiva
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.
Put on Your Detective Cap: Making Inferences
Students pretend to be detectives while being presented with various pictorial and textual clues that lead them to make an overall inference about what happened on Tuesday.
Themes in Hamlet
Students will make inferences about themes from the play, use textual evidence from the play to support their inferences using the CASE model, and will make a praise and criticism for peer answers.
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.
Who Is the Culprit?
Engaging in a crime scene investigation, students will collaboratively examine the evidence, make inferences about their observations, and write a detailed description of the crime. Students will then read an informational text about investigating a crime scene and answer inference questions.
Paired Passages with a Purpose
Students will make inferences about the author’s purpose after reading paired passages involving the same subject.
Poetry With Purpose
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.
Rhyming with Visuals
The teacher will model how to recognize rhyming words by hearing them, seeing them, reading them, and writing them. Then the students will practice hearing, seeing, reading, and writing “at” word family words.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Related to the Unit
This unit connects to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) by fostering a continuance in the area of phonological awareness as begun in previous lessons and introducing the exploration of nursery rhymes, poetry, and lullabies through literature and language play.
Click below to learn about the TEKS related to this unit.
Inferring with Dr. Seuss
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.
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.
Increasing Student Agency with Nonfiction Text
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.