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.

Students will read a text, identify its organizational pattern, highlight signal words, create a visual representation/graphic organizer, and present to the class.

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

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

Students will learn how to use textual evidence to make inferences and to support their understanding.

This lesson helps students summarize information in expository text using logical order. The lesson begins with students using a T-chart to categorize information as they summarize a text. By the end of the lesson, students will independently summarize information. As students transition through activities in the lesson, they will work both in groups and independently using a variety of best practices and a checklist to heighten intrinsic motivation, increasing chances for success.

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

Students will use a graphic organizer to draft the introduction paragraph of their expository essays.

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 used organizational patterns (compare and contrast, argumentative, cause and effect, problem and solution, chronological) to create anchor charts. Students then worked in groups to analyze text and plan a composition, using the anchor charts to complete the tasks. Ultimately, students created a plan from a self-generated topic to demonstrate an understanding of the use of organizational patterns. 

This lesson offers an engaging format for fourth graders to spend time working with different cause-and-effect situations and text to help move them toward the objective of correctly identifying an implicit cause-and-effect relationship within a text.

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.

The students will be guided through exploring how actions affect characters and their decisions. Students will put themselves in the shoes of a character and think about how they feel and why.

Students will work with partners, as well as independently, to create and evaluate summaries of expository text.

Students develop their perseverance skills as they continue to revise their writing for coherence. The teacher focuses on providing students with three tools to develop the students’ paragraphs for sentence-to-sentence connectedness and clarity. 

In learning stations, students use textual evidence and personal schema to generate inferences, make generalizations, and draw conclusions to support understanding about expository text.

The students will watch the teacher model how to create a summary, and then work in groups to create a summary from an expository text.

Students will read expository text, categorize findings, and reformulate the text into an obituary.

The students will read and summarize expository text using a graphic organizer to aid the process.