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 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 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.

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.

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 textual evidence to make inferences and to support their understanding.

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.

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.

Students are expected to work with partners and then in groups to complete a text feature (scavenger) hunt activity using the same nonfiction text.

The teacher will engage the students to make inferences through visuals, pictures, and informational text using problem-solving and self-questioning strategies.

This lesson teaches students to use the Get the Gist strategy to find the main idea of a section. Students will then put those Get the Gist statements together to begin a written summary of their 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.

Students will focus on context clues in a vocabulary lesson.

Students will be able to identify cause and effect relationships using an expository text.

Students will be able to determine the meaning of words using Greek, Latin, or other linguistic roots and affixes.

Students will practice using a protocol to create a summary of an expository text.

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