I love it when a lesson plan comes together and works out just right! I teach grammar and science this year so I decided to do a reading lesson with a piece of science text.
The kids have been learning about human impact on the Earth. So we focused on renewable energy for this lesson. I started off by using popplet to have them share what they know about renewable energy. When I taught the lesson to 4th period, popplet wouldn't load so we went old school using post it notes.
After this, we read small sections of the text chorally.
We used our focus question to set our purpose for reading.
Focus Question: What are the benefits of using renewable energy? What are some examples of renewable energy resources?
I created this chart for us to use to list the resources as we read. I also kept a list of the benefits they discovered as we read. We did a lot of discussion about the evidence they found in the text to help them make inferences and draw conclusions.
Once we finished reading four short columns of text, we decided we had what we needed to construct a response. I've found that when students tried to answer questions like this in the past they would only answer one part of the question or just list random facts from the text. So we really made sure each section of the question was addressed.
Then I assigned each small group a small section of the text. Each group has their own focus question to answer, which is very similar to the question we worked on answering together. When we finish, the small groups will be responsible for teaching the information they learned to the rest of the class.
We should finish this up next week and I hope they are successful with answering their focus question. I wrote the chart, benefits list, and focus question answer on chart paper and will display it for the students to use as a guide as they work on their own focus question.
I'll come back and share our final products after we finish next week!
