This unit addresses four 6th grade reading standards taught throughout the course of a trimester. These lessons are designed to be taught one day a week, while the other days in the trimester are focused on writing units. This unit is designed to be co-taught with a general education and special education teacher, but can be easily adapted if only one teacher is present.

This lesson aligns with the 7th grade Social Studies curriculum and works best when integrated into an interdisciplinary unit, such as Reliving the Middle Ages Across Lliterary Genres. Interdisciplinary Units are effective when teachers from two different content areas collaborate to plan lessons, assessments, activities and projects that support their content skills and standards. The content being taught in one course supports the content in another and students approach difficult, content-specific texts with more familiarity and gain better comprehension.  Students read two nonfiction articles about the Middle Ages, which lasted from about A.D. 500 to A.D. 1500. Both texts examine one of the most significant events of this time period-- the spread of the bubonic plague, or the Black Death. Each text is organized into cause-and-effect pattern of organization. One outlines HOW the disease spread (causes) and the other explains how it affected Europe (effects). Students analyze two texts by different authors writing about the same topic, the Black Plague, and compare/contrast how each author shapes their presentations of key information by emphasizing different evidence. 

In this lesson, students use the Cornell notes tool to do close reading of informational text.

Most people read and understand better when reading print. Usually when we are online, we are jumping around from place to place. To read online and really understand, we need to slow down and really think about what we are reading. In this lesson, students practice strategies to help them read deeply online. These strategies are based on the article in the lesson resources: "Strategies to Help Students 'Go Deep' When Reading Digitally" by Katrina Schwartz.Teacher copies the text from an online article into a Google Doc and shares it with students. Students use the highlighting tool to mark the most challenging vocabulary words and use strategies to determine their meaning. Then they develop a main idea for a paragraph by choosing one, two, three, and finally four words that make up the main idea. They type this above the paragraph and use formatting tools to make it a heading. As they repeat this process with additional paragraphs they are developing a summary of the article in the document outline.

Most people read and understand better when reading print. Usually when we are online, we are jumping around from place to place. To read online and really understand, we need to slow down and really think about what we are reading. In this lesson, students practice strategies to help them read deeply online. These strategies are based on the article in the lesson resources: "Strategies to Help Students 'Go Deep' When Reading Digitally" by Katrina Schwartz.Teacher copies the text from an online article into a Google Doc and shares it with students. Students use the highlighting tool to mark the most challenging vocabulary words and use strategies to determine their meaning. Then they develop a main idea for a paragraph by choosing one, two, three, and finally four words that make up the main idea. They type this above the paragraph and use formatting tools to make it a heading. As they repeat this process with additional paragraphs they are developing a summary of the article in the document outline.

This resource provides a blended learning multi-day station rotation for teaching the main idea in reading.

Students are introduced to the various purposes for writing informational text. Students use newspapers or online articles to identify examples that were written for each of the specific purposes and provide a summary.

The original resource written by  Haniah Lerner is for use during independent work time or literacy stations. The students listen to stories about elections, then choose one text to write the main idea, two key details, and define new wordsThis Remix is an activity to complete before the independent resource. It focuses on the book "Lillian's Right to Vote."   The students will gain an understanding of the concept voting, focusing on the difference between of a right or a privilege.