CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.6.2 - Determine a central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments.

 
Authors: National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers

Title: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.6.2 Determine A Central Idea Of A Text And How It... Reading:Informational Text - 6th Grade English Language Arts Common Core State Standards

Publisher: National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, Washington D.C.

Copyright Date: 2010

(Page last edited 10/08/2017)

1. Analyzing Advice as an Introduction to Shakespeare - Students read and analyze the advice given in Mary Schmich's 1997 Chicago Tribune column "Advice, Like Youth, Probably Just Wasted on the Young," which inspired the popular recording "Everybodys Free (to Wear Sunscreen)" by Baz Luhrmann. Exploring the column and its recording, students focus on both content and style through the use of central questions.
2. Biography Project: Research and Class Presentation - As students give the class presentations, have other students use the Oral Presentation Peer Feedback Form to write their feedback.
3. Book Reviews, Annotation, and Web Technology - Students work in groups to read and discuss a book, keeping track of their feelings and opinions about the book, as well as facts and quotations, as they read. After reading, each group goes through their notes on the book, marking items they want to include in a book review. They look at sample book reviews and discuss the common elements of book reviews. Next, each group works together to write a review of their book and use Web-authoring tools to publish the review onto a Web page. Students then decide which parts of their review they wish to annotate, with each student in the group responsible for one topic. Students research their topics, taking notes. Each student writes about his or her topic, including bibliographic information. The writings are then peer-reviewed by the group, published to the Web, and hyperlinked back to the group's book review.
4. Campaigning for Fair Use: Public Service Announcements on Copyright Awareness - Who owns what you compose? Who controls what happens with the words, images, music, sounds, videos that you create? What rights do you have to use other peoples compositions? This unit plan focuses on helping students find answers to these questions. Students explore a range of resources on fair use and copyright then design their own audio public service announcements (PSAs), to be broadcast over the schools public address system.
5. Compare and Contrast Electronic Text With Traditionally Printed Text - During this lesson, students compare and contrast the characteristics of electronic text with the characteristics of traditionally printed text, gaining a deeper understanding of how to navigate and comprehend information found on the Internet.
6. Courageous Characters - In this six-week unit, students select a fictional story with a courageous character and pair it with related informational text from the same historical time period.
7. Details and sequencing - This lesson will introduce students to careers in environmental protection as it teaches them to identify details and sequence in a non-fiction reading passage.
8. Draw Inferences and Conclusions - Explanation and practice
9. Drawing Inferences - Reading Resources
10. Dynamic Duo Text Talks: Examining the Content of Internet Sites - While this lesson makes use of websites about Anne Frank and the Holocaust, teachers can easily adapt the activities to a variety of topics. Guided by the questions on the Observation and Inquiry Sheet provided, students work together to explore several online texts on the chosen topic.
11. Entering History: Nikki Giovanni and Martin Luther King, Jr. - Students read Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in conjunction with Nikki Giovanni's poem "The Funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr." in order to better understand the speech and the impact it had both on observers like Giovanni during the Civil Rights Movement and on Americans today.
12. Every Punctuation Mark Matters: A Minilesson on Semicolons - In this minilesson, students first explore Dr. King's use of semicolons and their rhetorical significance. They then apply what they have learned by searching for ways to follow Dr. King's model and use the punctuation mark in their own writing.
13. Exploring and Sharing Family Stories - In this lesson, students are encouraged to explore the idea of memory in both large- and small-group settings. Students access their own life experiences and then discuss family stories they have heard. After choosing a family member to interview, students create questions, interview their relative, and write a personal narrative that describes not only the answers to their questions but their own reactions to these responses. These narratives are peer reviewed and can be published as a class magazine or a website.
14. Exploring Author's Voice Using Jane Addams Award-Winning Books - This lesson uses Jane Addams Award-winning books to explore author's voice and style.
15. Finding Figurative Language in The Phantom Tollbooth - This lesson provides hands-on differentiated instruction by guiding students to search for the literal definitions of figurative language using the Internet. It also guides students in understanding figurative meanings through the use of context clues and making inferences.
16. Heroes Around Us - 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.
17. Imagine That! Playing with Genre through Newspapers and Short Stories - This lesson uses narrative structures to introduce students to one form of expository writingnews briefs and articles. By condensing a short story into a newspaper article and expanding an article into a short story, students will explore the ways that exposition differs from narration.
18. Inference Notes - Use this diagram to help interpret inferences.
19. Inference Riddles - Having fun with inference and prediction
20. Let It Grow: An Inquiry-Based Organic Gardening Research Project - This project motivates students to learn about organic gardening by developing their own research questions, conducting research, and gardening at their school. They then create signs about their plants and present their research to the class so that other students can learn about each plant.
21. Making Inferences - Improving Reading Comprehension for Students with Dyslexia
22. Making Inferences and Drawing Conclusions - Descriptions of the various ways to aid you in reaching a conclusion
23. Making Interences - Worksheet to use for note taking while reading
24. Making Interences - Worksheet that makes the distinction between strong and weak interences
25. Making Interences 1 - Passages to read and then make inferences
26. Making Interences Using Pictures - Inference worksheet and lesson plan
27. Media Awareness: Helping a Product Cross the Finish Line - In this final lesson of the Media Awareness unit, students will complete their advertisements, adding in details (such as color and symbols) and background/foreground space on the picture plane.
28. Myth and Truth: The "First Thanksgiving" - By exploring myths surrounding the Wampanoag, the pilgrims, and the "first Thanksgiving," this lesson asks students to think critically about commonly believed myths regarding the Wampanoag Indians in colonial America.
29. Press Conference for Bud, Not Buddy - This lesson can be used after the reading of Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis. The lesson encourages students to use higher level thinking skills and asks them to examine different character perspectives. Students demonstrate comprehension of the story by actively involving themselves in group and whole-class discussions.
30. Promoting Diversity in the Classroom and School Library through Social Action - Through an exploration of stereotypes in children's picture books such as books from Disney's Princess Collection, students identify the limited view established in these fictional worlds. Next, students compare these stereotyped representations to more diverse portrayals in matching texts
31. Proverbs: Contemporary Proverbs - This lesson challenges students to craft more apparent meanings for traditional maxims. They first search for proverbs from around the world and select several they like. They then update the proverbs to be more contemporary. Finally, they write new proverbs of their own.
32. Rules of Inference - Lesson discussing the rules of inference.
33. Scaffolding Comprehension Strategies Using Graphic Organizers - In this lesson, collaborative strategic reading (CSR) is initially presented to students through modeling and whole-class instruction.
34. Scaling Back to Essentials: Scaffolding Summarization With Fishbone Mapping - Complete fishbone maps that highlight the main ideas and relevant details from a cause-effect text; lesson plan
35. Seeing Integration From Different Viewpoints - In this Directed Reading-Thinking Activity, students make predictions about the story before reading, focus on key ideas as they read aloud in groups, and enhance their comprehension of the story with a postreading class discussion.
36. Story Character Homepage - Combine higher order thinking with creativity in this lesson that uses diamante poems to illustrate the phenomenon of cause and effect. Students define and identify instances of cause and effect to help them generate their own examples.
37. Story shackles: Linking students to written text - This activity will enable students to practice critical reading for information and details. The students will create summaries of short sections of the text that they will link into one class summary of the whole text.
38. Strategies for Better Reading - Read between the lines by using the power of inference, predict what will happen next in a story, and identify the main ideas in what you read
39. The Big Bad Wolf: Analyzing Point of View in Texts - Lesson plan helps students look at the author's purpose and viewpoint, and also recognize gaps in the text - Extension activities include debating a fairy tale using different character viewpoints.
40. The History Behind Song Lyrics - In this lesson, students research and categorize items from the song as well as illustrate their historical relevance. Students use an online chart to display their research.
41. Truth in Advertising - Read and identify various types of advertisements, analyze advertisements for examples of persuasive writing, generalizing, exaggeration, and scare tactics, and write responses to ads that youve analyzed
42. Using the Check and Line Method to Enhance Reading Comprehension - The Check and Line method described in this lesson encourages awareness by requiring readers to place a light pencil check in the margin if they have understood the line of text, and a dash or line if they have not. At the end of the paragraph, students use the GMR method to go back, motivate their brains, and reread any text marked with a line.
43. When Am I? - Inference worksheet
44. Where Am I? - Inference worksheet
45. Who Am I? - Inference worksheet
46. Writing Free Verse in the "Voice" of Cesar Chavez - This lesson gives students the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the characteristics of free verse and to write a free verse poem using written material about the labor activist Cesar Chavez.
47. You can customize the lesson, if desired, to promote reading any time of the year. - In this lesson, students first explore resumes using the internet. They then work as a class to construct a sample resume for a character in a book they have all read. Next, they explore want ads and online job sites for possible jobs for a character from a book they have read on their own. They write a letter of application and create a resume for their character for the selected job.