Students learn how to use the pictures in their books to retell a story in sequence. The teacher models how to use the pictures to retell the story Stellaluna by Janell Cannon. The students and teacher complete a graphic organizer using picture representations from the book. The graphic organizer is a frame for all the elements of a strong retell and requires students to include new vocabulary; the characters and setting; and the beginning, middle, and end of the book, Stellaluna. Students will apply the picture retell strategy by completing a graphic organizer for their own book and retelling the story to peers and their teacher.

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.

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.

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.

Students will be able to understand vowel digraphs (ai/ay pattern).

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.

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

Third grade students will identify and discuss facts and details from expository text and draw conclusions using textual evidence in learning stations.

Students will use a checklist to peer edit a composition. They will check for coherence through the proper use of transition words and conjunctions.

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

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 learn how to use text features to locate information and verify answers within an expository text.  

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.

Students will collaboratively apply revising and editing skills to make their way through passages and a series of questions to decode a lock. If groups successfully complete the tasks, they will escape the room and win a prize.

Students will work collaboratively to infer the implied meaning of a metaphor used in a poem. Students will complete a graphic organizer in which they discuss with their peers the two items being compared in the metaphor, write and illustrate the literal meaning of each word being compared, and use this information to infer the implied meaning of the metaphor. The lesson has a strong focus on vocabulary development and is designed with English learners (ELs) in mind.  
 

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.