In this lesson students will work in small groups to arrange moon phase cards into the correct sequence. Students will learn to explain patterns of changes in the appearance of the moon as it orbits Earth.

Students will develop their summarizing skills while learning about local history. They will learn to consider audience while selecting topics, conducting research and interviews, and writing historical markers for their town.

Students take a walk on the wild side when they develop an understanding of nonfiction texts with hands-on experiences and intense analysis.

The lessons in this unit are designed for an ELA class. They are intended to be used, if possible, in a collaborative unit with a history teacher using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In this unit, students will explore the different forms of transportation over time—from the New World and early America, to present day—and their impact on society and the environment (Change and Continuity). They will explore the impact of the different forms of transportation on economics, migration, and geography (where people live and how they adapt their environment to their transportation need), as well as how to become critical readers by gathering information from a variety of primary and secondary sources to understand the impact of transportation on history.

This unit is centered around an anchor text that may be common among content area teachers in a high school setting. Although this unit may be incorporated into any high-school English class, it is aligned with Common Core standards for 9-10. This unit will primarily focus on informational and argumentative texts, and can be used to incorporate more informational texts (as directed by the Common Core) into English classrooms at the high school level. This unit is best suited to a collaborative model of development in which ELA and content area teachers share an anchor text (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and communicate about how to connect diverse skills to common texts and essential questions.

This is a blank template which provides users with the basic formatting to begin building Primary Source based lessons and units. Open this resource and choose "Remix this resource" to begin.

Examples of completed exemplars have been added within the Table of Contents, under "Resource Sets"

Through a study of the moon, students will be guided through an inquiry process using primary sources to learn how we shape our understanding of the past (history). They will also learn how new discoveries and observations change our perceptions over time, as each succeeding generation creates knowledge and adds new technology. Students will then pose their own questions to wonder how future discoveries or new technology might change our understanding of the world and our universe.

In this lesson, students read informational pieces about whether or not schools should teach cursive writing. They will evaluate the arguments presented and then choose a side of the issue. Finally, they will write their own arguments expressing their points of view.

Welcome to Essential Reading. This course has been designed to enable you to focus your learning on specific areas of improvement. Unlike a typical college course where you would complete lessons in chronological order, this course allows you to focus on just specific skills. Modules Include: Recognition and Decoding, Vocabulary, and Functional and Informational Texts

In this lesson students use a simple SOAPSTone form (College Board resource) to analyze six aspects of informational texts: subject, occasion, audience, purpose, speaker, and tone.

This 18 day unit explicitly teaches text structures, summary, text features, reading informational text about Mesopotamia, and writing a book about Mesopotamia. Instruction moves from high scaffolding to moderate scaffolding to independent practice as students become familiar with the various text structures, how to identify them, what graphic organizer will work with each text structure, how to use notes recorded in graphic organizers to write summaries, and how to compile an informational book. Mesopotamia is the content used as an anchor.

In this lesson students will create a graphic organizer that uses the titles and subtitles of an informational text before they begin reading.

In this lessons students identify information from text using titles, subtitles, diagrams, charts, graphs, maps, photographs, illustrations, and captions by using a preview checklist.

This "jigsaw" activity will give students the opportunity to work in groups to summarize a 1 to 2 page informational text. It "jigsaws" down to 1 class summary and can be done in 2 or 3 days. This plan was designed for a class of 22 students but can be easily modified by varying group size.

Writing Commons aspires to be a community for writers, a creative learning space for students in courses that require college-level writing, a creative, interactive space for teachers to share resources and pedagogy. Our primary goal is to provide the resources and community students need to improve their writing, particularly students enrolled in courses that require college-level writing. As mentioned in 'About Us', we believe learning materials should be free for all students and teachers‰ part of the cultural commons. Hence, we provide free access to an award-winning, college textbook that was published by a major publisher and awarded the Distinguished Book Award by Computers and Composition: an International Journal.

This is a short assessment for working with informational writing and the topic of hurricanes with 6th graders.