Hooked on Inferring
In this lesson, students use text evidence and schema to create an inference. Students read informational text and practice inferring with varying levels of support.
Creating Connections Across Literary Texts
Students will explore organizational patterns in short passages and use signal words/phrases as evidence to support the main idea and their understanding.
Teacher Introducing the Lesson
What’s Your Feature?
Students will learn how to use text features to locate information and verify answers within an expository text.
Newton's Second Law
Students will work in partners to investigate Newton’s second law by testing a series of experiments with varying conditions.
Does it have Potential?
Students will work with partners to investigate how mass, potential energy, and kinetic energy act on objects dropped from varying heights.
Video of the lesson being taught
Syncing with Inferences
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.
Critiquing and Creating Compound and Complex Sentences
Students will create compound and complex sentences with proper comma usage and present their explanations to the class.
Student work
Layers to Understanding Poetry
Students will apply their analytical skills to different types of poems by reviewing the devices used in poetry, reading and analyzing two poems, and creating a poster to demonstrate their learning.
Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic Cells
Students will categorize cells as prokaryotic or eukaryotic by identifying the presence or lack of a nucleus.
Teacher Summing Up Lesson
Lights, Camera, Action!
Students compare and contrast potential and kinetic energy by creating a real-world model through a movie.
Crime Scene Investigations through Text Structures
Students participate in an activity where they must solve a crime. Students visit different stations that include surveillance tape, tips, eyewitness statements, and a crime scene. Each station is formatted as a different organizational pattern allowing students to practice creating summaries reflecting the structure used.
How Newton's Laws Apply Every Day
Students collaboratively determine how the characteristics of a real-world job correlate with each of Newton’s Laws and why that is relevant to their own lives.
Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences With Expository Text
Third grade students will identify and discuss facts and details from expository text and draw conclusions using textual evidence in learning stations.
Circuit Designers
Students will work in small groups of two to three on a structured challenge around circuits which includes requirements such as including using a switch or a conductor. They will then use that knowledge to work on a collaborative challenge to solve a relevant problem related to elephant poaching. Students will create a containment system that will have an alarm system, a lighting system, and a way to pass through. Finally, they will review the other projects and discuss similarities and differences in the design.
Quality Questioning
In this lesson, students analyze, rate, and revise questions generated in response to their reading of a short story. They use the questions in student-led conversations and activities, helping them understand the connection between strong questioning, inferring, and communicating during reading.
Analyzing the Text for Summary and Connections
Students will critically think and communicate; they will summarize a text to understand and make connections to other texts, themselves, and the world.
Analyzing Author’s Purpose: Argumentative Text
Students will read a pre-Civil War speech and write author’s purpose statements using the argumentative verbs explain, urge, convince, and encourage.
Teacher in Action
Human Paragraphs
Students assume roles of paragraph parts, including the main idea and supporting details, in order to reassemble a text that has been divided into pieces based on textual purpose.
Connecting Author’s Purpose and Organizational Patterns
Students explore and analyze how the author can achieve a specific purpose by using a variety of organizational patterns.
Bulldogs “Paws” for a Good Summary
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.