Rhyming is Out of This World!
Students will participate in stations with board games that reinforce rhyming, onset, and rimes, and blending.
Retelling with Confidence
Students learn how to use the pictures in their books to retell a story in sequence. The teacher models how to use the pictures to retell the story Stellaluna by Janell Cannon. The students and teacher complete a graphic organizer using picture representations from the book. The graphic organizer is a frame for all the elements of a strong retell and requires students to include new vocabulary; the characters and setting; and the beginning, middle, and end of the book, Stellaluna. Students will apply the picture retell strategy by completing a graphic organizer for their own book and retelling the story to peers and their teacher.
Flying High with Inferences
In this lesson, students integrate background knowledge and textual clues to respond to inferential questions that were generated by the students themselves. The lesson utilizes instructional strategies that have been identified as best practice for teaching inference such as: generating questions, identifying keywords, and activating prior knowledge. Additionally, the lesson is designed to support English learners and utilizes visuals, graphic organizers, sentence frames, and cooperative learning.
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.
Choose Your Words Wisely!
Students will create a collection using objects, participate in a read-aloud, create another collection using sight word cards, and present their collections to the class.
Teacher reviewing vocabulary words.
Stellar Sentences
Students will read a group of words, arrange them to make sense as a complete thought, and recognize and use capitalization at the beginning and a period as the ending punctuation mark.
Journalists Research, Too!
Students will research information in order to create a newspaper article about the topic.
Locating Facts and Details in Text Features
First-grade students will rotate through engaging learning stations and read portions of expository texts to identify facts and details embedded within text features.
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.
Reading Strategies: Choose, Monitor, and Comprehend with Nonfiction Texts
Students will engage in activities that allow them to take a book walk and use criteria to choose a good-fit book, use strategies to self-monitor their own comprehension while independently reading, and use partner talk criteria to reflect on their strategies collaboratively.
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.