Growing Our Vocabulary Goals
Students will use a variety of vocabulary strategies to apply their knowledge of unknown and multiple-meaning words.
2 Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment: Administering and Interpreting Results
This binder details how to score and interpret the results of the Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment (TMSFA). This course is Unit 4 of the Texas Adolescent Literacy Academy (TALA). These materials are available for view only; no credit or certificate is provided.
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.
Students working
Retelling Fiction with Logical Order
Students will be able to understand how to retell a fictional story in logical order using transitional words.
Got Force?
Students use various surfaces and a weighted car to see how far the car will travel using balanced and unbalanced forces.
Una Reseña de un Restaurante
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.
Many Stripes of Inferring
Students will infer character feelings and motivations and support their inference with text evidence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Convergent Plate Boundaries
Students will design and test models that will identify crustal features formed by convergent plate boundaries.
Full Speed Ahead
Students will use hover pucks to measure speed over a distance of six meters. Once speed has been calculated, students will determine velocity using the same data. Finally, students will be able to label all points of acceleration.
Motion Pictures
In this lesson, students will be introduced to the concept of motion representation using distance vs. time graphs. Students will recognize labeling of axes, steepness related to speed, horizontal lines as non-motion, and downward slope as return to origin.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills Related to the Unit
Click below to learn about the TEKS related to this unit.
Earth: A Tilted Affair
After a brief review of direct and indirect sunlight, students will arrange heat maps and globes around a drawing of the Sun based on the tilt of Earth and how it affects Earth’s temperature.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Related to the Unit
Click below to learn about the TEKS related to this unit.
Evaluating Inferences
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.
Santa Timeline Breakout
Students collaborate and critically-think to analyze resources from informational texts of various disciplines and unlock a breakout box. Once the box is unlocked, students receive a final text to summarize.
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.
Students working on poster
Biotic and Abiotic Factors of an Ecosystem
Students will explore abiotic and biotic factors in various ecosystems by working through stations. Students will be able to identify and describe abiotic and biotic factors within an ecosystem.
Moving Beyond P. I. E.
In this lesson, students infer the author’s purpose of selected paragraphs of expository text. The lesson is designed with English learners in mind and utilizes instructional strategies designed to scaffold instruction such as collaborative learning strategies, student generated questions, anchor charts, and sentence frames to facilitate oral responses.