In this lesson, students analyze, rate, and revise questions generated in response to their reading of a short story. They use the questions in student-led conversations and activities, helping them understand the connection between strong questioning, inferring, and communicating during reading.

Students assume roles of paragraph parts, including the main idea and supporting details, in order to reassemble a text that has been divided into pieces based on textual purpose.

Students participate in an activity where they must solve a crime. Students visit different stations that include surveillance tape, tips, eyewitness statements, and a crime scene. Each station is formatted as a different organizational pattern allowing students to practice creating summaries reflecting the structure used.

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. 

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.

Students will create compound and complex sentences with proper comma usage and present their explanations to the class. 

Students will apply their analytical skills to different types of poems by reviewing the devices used in poetry, reading and analyzing two poems, and creating a poster to demonstrate their learning. 

Students will learn how to use textual evidence to make inferences and to support their understanding.

Students explore and analyze how the author can achieve a specific purpose by using a variety of organizational patterns.

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.

Students will read a text passage, looking for and highlighting key words that indicate the appropriate organizational pattern of the text.

Students will explore cause and effect relationships by creating different representations of a cause or an effect from a given scenario.

Students will participate in stations with board games that reinforce rhyming, onset, and rimes, and blending.

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.

Students describe a restaurant in restaurant review form using simple phrases and sentences. As they write, students focus on noun-adjective agreement and sentence structure.

In this lesson, students rotate to various learning stations and work with a partner to complete tasks that require them to generate inferences, infer the theme of short reading passages, write personal narratives or stories that exemplify a selected theme, and develop Tier Two high utility vocabulary. The lesson incorporates best practices for English learners (ELs) and at-risk students such as the use of collaborative learning, graphic organizers, anchor charts, and technology applications.

This research lesson encourages students to become better illustrators and authors. Students will work in collaborative groups and independently to develop drafts.

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. 

Students will revise a simple sentence by copying it on a series of sticky notes and adding new words using glitter pens and star-shaped sticky notes. 

Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Vertical Alignment

Click below to learn about the TEKS related to the unit and Research Lesson.