Planning a Draft
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.
Pack Your Bags!
Students learn to determine the difference between topic, central idea, and details using mystery bags, graphic organizers, and short passages.
Adventures in Inferring
Students will infer the message the author is trying to convey using schema and evidence from the text. Readers use this strategy, known as making inferences, to think about what they are reading.
Students progress from a surface-level understanding of text to a deeper understanding by processing and expressing details and examples to support their understanding of observations through background knowledge and textual evidence.
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.
Author’s Purpose in a Bag
Students will infer from text evidence the author’s purpose and explain their thinking.
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.
Text Feature Fun!
Students will locate and identify text features in non-fiction books while matching the purpose to the appropriate text feature.
Making Inferences and Drawing Conclusions in an Anne Frank Digital Challenge
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.
Sensing Poetry
Students locate sensory details and create their own sensory detail poem.
Teacher discusses the sensory details that correspond with the five senses
Inferences with Wolfie and Dot
In this lesson, students use text evidence and background knowledge to make inferences. Students infer during each phase of the lesson using a variety of literary sources and activities.
Using Captions to Infer
The students will be shown a picture with a caption. The students will partner up and discuss what they see and have read in the caption. The students must make an inference based off of the evidence and write an inference statement. Students will upload image and inference statements to a class sharing app for others to read and comment on.
Digging in with Text Features
Students will read an expository text and apply text features by comparing and contrasting information regarding two animals’ homes.
Teacher models how to use a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast two things
Why Would They Say That?
Students will analyze multiple texts on the same topic to identify the text structures used and find each author’s purpose.
Teacher compares author's purpose in text to the purposes of eating utensils.
Home Is Where the Heart Is
Through teacher modeling, blended learning stations, self-monitoring, and developing and responding to questioning strategies of reciprocal teaching, students will be able to examine a variety of visual and written expository texts and compare how the authors achieved similar or different purposes.
Investigating Balanced and Unbalanced Forces
Students will investigate balanced and unbalanced forces through a series of lab stations.
Actions Speak Louder Than Words
First-grade students will discuss, identify, and compare the physical and emotional traits of two characters from the fictional book, The Recess Queen. In stations, students will generate inferences about character motivation and describe characters and their actions while making personal and logical connections.