Pufferfish and Sea Turtle

Common Core Connection

This standard asks students to ask and answer questions about a text, and, in this lesson, the students get to do the answering.  This standard increases in complexity across the grades, and the big issue is that students use evidence from the text to support their answer. It is my experience that most students seem to be able to answer questions, but answering them based on what the text says is another story.  Students need to be able to locate the answer in the text, and they seem to want to use other sources to answer the questions. I find myself saying, "Was that in this text?" or "Where did you find that in the text?"  The students must learn to use the specific text only to locate the answer, and I often highlight or underline it in the first grade.

In order to meet the expectations of this standard the students also need to be able to focus on the important details in a text rather than the extraneous things that simply add too the text.  This is a quite challenging task to teach students.  This includes analyzing and sorting important information in a text to information that may seem less important. They also have to attempt to separate their prior knowledge, and information they have learned in previous text on the same topics.  The text evidence has to be from the specific text that the class is analyzing.

In later lessons the students generate questions, because it is more challenging.  But, in this lesson the students also read to learn about the text's content, instead of simply learning to read.  The students are learning skills that will prepare them to gain knowledge and information from text.

Lesson Overview

I chose Pufferfish for the guided practice and Sea Turtle for the partner work. This topic connects to the coral reef lessons, and I think students need a lot of information in one content area when asked to write about it.  The class creates an informational paragraph in the guided practice and the partner work.

In this lesson the students do Transitions every twenty minutes and work in small groups (Partners) throughout the lesson. I have a video on each strategy in the resources.

Introductory Activity

This lesson image is the neatest one ever, so I project it on the Smart board for my class to ask each other questions about.  I am assessing their ability to ask questions, but mostly allowing them to get excited.  I then share that we will be answering questions that I created about pufferfish and sea turtles. Last, we chant the lesson goal three times. I can answer questions about a text.