Organized Authors: Name That Structure
Students will read a text passage, looking for and highlighting key words that indicate the appropriate organizational pattern of the text.
Intelligible Inferences
Students will work in cooperative learning groups that foster empathy to make inferences from pictures and text. They will discuss the differences between inferences made from pictures and inferences made from text.
A Trip to the Hospital
Students participate in a set of stations about the work done in different areas of a hospital. During each station, students revise paragraphs based on word choice, clarity, and transitions while also looking at introductions and adding or deleting sentences.
Creating Connections Across Literary Texts
Students will explore organizational patterns in short passages and use signal words/phrases as evidence to support the main idea and their understanding.
A Reader’s Survival Guide: Connecting and Synthesizing Ideas in Nonfiction Texts
This lesson is designed to teach students to synthesize and make connections between ideas within a text and with previous texts students have read.
Exploring Identity and Diving Deep into the Complex Meaning of Poetry
This lesson is designed to teach students to make complex inferences, choose specific text evidence that strongly supports the inference, and develop a coherent explanation of how the evidence strongly supports the validity of the idea within the genre of poetry.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Related to the Unit
Click below to learn about the TEKS related to this unit.
Summarizing Fiction
Students will analyze effective and ineffective summaries of a fictional text and identify the characteristics that classify the summaries as either effective or ineffective.
Summarizing as a Reading Strategy
Students work collaboratively using reading and comprehension skills to demonstrate their mastery of summarizing a text or piece of literature.
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.
Human Paragraphs
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.
Catch Me If You Can—Retelling "The Gingerbread Man"
Students retell or re-enact events in sequence from "The Gingerbread Man" using pictures.
Uncovering Tone in Poetry
Students will interpret the tone of a poem, cite text evidence to justify their response, and research a synonym for the word they chose to expand their understanding of Tier 2 vocabulary.
Crime Scene Investigations through Text Structures
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.
Critiquing and Creating Compound and Complex Sentences
Students will create compound and complex sentences with proper comma usage and present their explanations to the class.
Empowered by the Evidence: Making Inferences with Confidence
A mini-lesson on how to select the best text evidence to support an inference or draw a conclusion is presented. Teachers use the think-aloud method to model how to use a checklist in order to identify the strongest support provided in the text. Students are then asked to work with a group to discuss and support a given conclusion drawn from a self-chosen text. They are encouraged to use the checklist to ensure the best evidence is identified
Connecting Author’s Purpose and Organizational Patterns
Students explore and analyze how the author can achieve a specific purpose by using a variety of organizational patterns.