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.

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 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 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 locate sensory details and create their own sensory detail poem.

Students will work collaboratively on a digital challenge activity by reading short excerpts of nonfiction text and explore an online webpage where they will learn more about the life of Anne Frank and the World War II era. By answering inferential and organizational structure questions, regarding those topics, students will be in a race against each other to crack the code to a lockbox.

In cooperative groups, students rotate through stations to identify the main idea of selected passages while making inferences using expository text.

In learning stations, students use textual evidence and personal schema to make inferences about the structure and elements of poetry, and provide textual evidence to support their understanding.

Students will identify explicit cause and effect relationships using keywords and phrases while reading relevant informational texts aligned with technology and current events.

Students will infer from text evidence the author’s purpose and explain their thinking.

Students will use a mentor text to identify cause and effect relationships. Students will also find the missing cause or effect. They will work collaboratively to complete a graphic organizer and use teacher-created anchor charts to help them in identifying the relationships.

The students will identify elements of nonfiction text by analyzing the importance of text features.

In this lesson, students are initially captivated by Earth Day-themed pictures, thus providing them with ideas to prewrite, and will have meaningful writing to revise. The lesson utilizes a mentor text to demonstrate the necessity of subjects and predicates. Students apply their knowledge of sentence syntax by revising a chosen sentence and rewriting the sentence to be shared with the class during a gallery walk.

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

Students will employ critical thinking skills to order details logically and become more effective at communicating their ideas to readers. The lesson will guide students toward using critical thinking in the planning phase of drafting to purposefully include details that interest readers.