The Researching to Deepen Understanding units lay out an inquiry process through which students learn how to deepen their understanding of topics. Students pose and refine inquiry questions, exploring areas they wish to investigate. They find and assess sources and organize researched material in ways that will support their analysis and integration of information.

Students sometimes have difficulty recalling important events in their early lives to write about. This lesson works to resolve this challenge by having students brainstorm as a whole class, in order to benefit from collective recall as they define pivotal moments in their lives. Once items have been remembered, students focus on details of these events by choosing graphic symbols for these moments, people, and places, narrowing their lists to eight to ten items, and then ranking and graphing the items so that the overall connections and patterns are revealed. The graphic life map not only gives students specific events to write about but also includes a graphic for each memory that will help bring the events to life.

This resource contains a selection of different graphic organizers for students to use.

In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

This article explains how to model a range of prewriting techniques and introduces several mnemonics to help students organize their writing.

Students will explore the distinction between a hero and an idol. Based on collaboratively established criteria for heroism and characteristics of heroes, students will select, read about, and report on a hero. Students will identify how their hero matches their criteria and characteristics. Hero reports will be compiled into a class book. As a follow-up, the teacher will read aloud and lead a discussion of the poem Heroes We Never Name to emphasize the fact that there are heroes all around us. Students will write about a hero they know and describe this person's noble qualities and deeds.

Featuring the India Arie song "I Am Not My Hair," this lesson takes students through the pre-writing, production, and editing phases of an informative essay.

In this reflective essay, Chief Dan George compares his native North American culture with that of white culture. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this essay through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this lesson, students work on narrowing a topic for an expository writing piece, conducting research, and creating source cards.

In this lesson, students explore, examine, and evaluate information for a research topic, and develop an organizational pattern for writing.

In this lesson, students test a variety of insulators and relate their knowledge to energy conservation. With teacher guidance, students design their own investigation. After all experiments are completed, the class looks across the data and draws evidence-based conclusions.

Assess students' understanding of scientific inquiry including the following skills: observation, background research, scientific procedures (including investigation design, measurement techniques, and error analysis), data collection, data display, scientific questions, formulating an hypothesis. Students will design and carry out an investigation to test which material is the best insulator; they will predict which way heat energy will flow in a system and analyze the flow of energy in a system from one point to another and from one form to another.

In this lesson, students read a non-fiction book about a career and write a six-paragraph expository composition about the book.

Students can improve their comprehension of content area textbooks by summarizing chapters in the form of magazine covers. This lesson begins by asking students to examine a magazine and discuss the ways in which the magazine cover's headlines and graphics express the main ideas of its articles. They then review a chapter in a content area textbook and use an interactive tool to create a magazine cover that summarizes the textbook information. This process enables students to form connections and create visual representations to share information. Although the focus is on informational texts, this assignment could potentially be expanded to include other types of text as well.

Jabberwocky is an epic poem told through nonsense words. The poem relates a father’s quest for his son that involves the slaying of a beast (The Jabberwock). The poem charts the son’s progress from his departure to his successful return. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this poem through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Students will work collaboratively to gather information about various groups of gelatinous zooplankton. They will be able to compare and contrast at least three different groups of zooplankton organisms and describe how gelatinous zooplankton fit into marine food webs. Groups will prepare a brief written report summarizing the information they have found and orally present to the rest of the class.

This autobiographical piece tells what a neat, tidy rule-follower this author was in his youth—except for his yo-yo. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this lesson, students compare and contrast the tragic event that occurs in a work of fiction to a real-life tragic experience that occurs in a work of non-fiction.

Students will read a description of a conclusion and a passage about Hawaii. Students will then write a conclusion for the passage. This resource supports English language development for English language learners.