In this lesson, students integrate background knowledge and textual clues to respond to inferential questions that were generated by the students themselves. The lesson utilizes instructional strategies that have been identified as best practice for teaching inference such as: generating questions, identifying keywords, and activating prior knowledge. Additionally, the lesson is designed to support English learners and utilizes visuals, graphic organizers, sentence frames, and cooperative learning.

Students will read a group of words, arrange them to make sense as a complete thought,  and recognize and use capitalization at the beginning and a period as the ending punctuation mark.

Students will research information in order to create a newspaper article about the topic.

First-grade students will rotate through engaging learning stations and read portions of expository texts to identify facts and details embedded within text features.

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