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.
The Arrangement of Elements: The Periodic Table
This resource provides flexible alternate or additional learning opportunities for students to interpret the arrangement of elements on the Periodic Table, Eighth Grade Science TEKS (8)(5)(C).
Introduction to Plate Tectonics
This resource is intended to use for Tier I classroom instruction.
Human Impact
This resource can be used, in conjunction with best practices, for Tier I classroom instruction.
Introducing the Atom
A resource to be used for Tier I instruction for the introduction of the structure of atoms.
Newton's Law of Inertia
This resource provides instructional resources for Newton's First Law, the law of inertia.
Newton's Law of Action-Reaction
This resource is to support TEKS (8)(6)(C), specifically the Newton's third law or the law of action-reaction.
Classification of Organisms
This resource provides flexible alternate or additional learning opportunities for students to identify the characteristics of organisms that classify them into currently recognized Kingdoms, Sixth Grade Science TEKS (6)(12)(D).
Energy Transformations
A Tier I resource for TEKS (6)(9)(C), energy transformations.
Understanding New Vocabulary within Context
You will learn how to find the meanings of words through analogy and other word relationships.
Understand New Vocabulary Using Roots and Affixes
You will learn how to determine the meaning of grade-level academic English words derived from Latin, Greek, or other linguistic roots and affixes.
Potential and Kinetic Energy
This resource provides Tier I instruction ideas for Grade 6+ science teachers in the area of potential and kinetic energy.
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.