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.
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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.
Reading and Writing to a Prompt (English III Reading and Writing)
You will learn skills necessary for reading and writing to a prompt.
Author’s Purpose in a Bag
Students will infer from text evidence the author’s purpose and explain their thinking.
Imagery (English III Reading)
In this lesson, you will be able to identify the imagery in a text and evaluate its effectiveness.
How to Read and Analyze a Poem (English III Reading)
You will be able to read and analyze a poem using your knowledge of literary and poetic devices.
Writing a Topic Proposal (English III Writing)
You will learn how to write a topic proposal that addresses your topic, purpose, and audience.
Gaining Understanding and Information from Introductory Material, Headings, and Other Division Markers in Texts (English III Reading)
You will learn how to look at introductory material, headings, and other subdivisions to gain an understanding and an overview of the text’s organization.
Developing a Thesis and Introduction (English III Writing)
You will learn how to write a thesis statement that explains your position about a topic.
Organizing the Structure of a Paper (English III Writing)
You will learn how to organize your essay with relevant evidence that supports your thesis.
Editing for Proper Voice, Tense, and Syntax (English III Writing and Research)
You will practice checking for proper voice, tense, and syntax.
Annotating to Deepen Understanding (English III Reading)
You will learn how to annotate or mark a text as you read and re-read to gain deeper understanding of the text.
Documenting Sources and Writing a Bibliography/Works Cited (English III Research )
You will learn how to cite your sources in the body of your research paper and write a works cited page according to the Modern Language Association (MLA) style manual.
Exploring Identity and Diving Deep into the Complex Meaning of Poetry
This lesson is designed to teach students to make complex inferences, choose specific text evidence that strongly supports the inference, and develop a coherent explanation of how the evidence strongly supports the validity of the idea within the genre of poetry.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Related to the Unit
Click below to learn about the TEKS related to this unit.
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.
Paired Passages with a Purpose
Students will make inferences about the author’s purpose after reading paired passages involving the same subject.