Texas Education Agency
Texas Gateway: Make Inferences in Informational/expository Text
[Accessible by TX Educators. Free Registration/Login Required] In this lesson, you will be taking a look at how authors of informational texts, such as expository texts, organize their writing and the effects that organization can have...
Love To Know Media
Your Dictionary: Lesson Plans on Summary Writing Skills
This article focuses on how to help teachers write lesson plans that will aid students in learning to write clear, concise summaries of movies and literary works.
Texas Education Agency
Texas Gateway: Writing Expository Text Summaries
This resource presents instructional practices for writing summaries of expository text in English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies classes.
Louisiana Department of Education
Louisiana Doe: Louisiana Believes: English Language Arts: Grade 7: Written in Bone
This unit focuses on learning the stories of our past. Students will explore various texts (literary and informational) and their unique perspectives on history to consider how different experiences offer a different historical...
Louisiana Department of Education
Louisiana Doe: Louisiana Believes: Ela Guidebooks: Summarizing
This strategy helps students refine their understanding of texts to meet reading expectations and prepare for writing about texts.
AdLit
Ad lit.org: Classroom Strategies: Semantic Feature Analysis
The Semantic Feature Analysis strategy engages students in reading assignments by asking them to relate selected vocabulary to key features of the text. This technique uses a matrix to help students discover how one set of things is...
AdLit
Ad lit.org: Previewing Texts in Content Classrooms
Textbook previewing strategies focus not only on the structure of the text - such as the table of contents, index, chapter introductions, and so forth - but on a content overview, which focuses on the concepts and questions covered in...
AdLit
Ad lit.org: Multiple Texts: Multiple Opportunities for Teaching and Learning
Engaging all students in a themed study or unit is a challenge that teachers can resolve by using materials that match students' independent or instructional reading levels (Robb 1994, 2000). When students face textbooks that are above...
AdLit
Ad lit.org: Pre Reading Activities for El Ls
Pre-reading activities can engage student interest, activate prior knowledge, or pre-teach potentially difficult concepts and vocabulary. They also offer a great opportunity to introduce comprehension components such as cause and effect,...
E Reading Worksheets
E Reading Worksheets: Text Structure: Test 3
In this text structure test, students read passages and select the correct text structure; they are sometimes asked to explain how the evidence to prove their selections.
E Reading Worksheets
E Reading Worksheets: Text Structures
A complete reading activity covering text structure with several interactive practice questions. Press the "play" button to access the material.
Tom Richey
Slide Share: Skill Main Idea and Details
A slide show with fourteen slides with information and examples on finding the main ideas and supporting details in an informational text.
Scholastic
Scholastic: Guidelines for Determining an Author's Main Idea
Follow the steps in this printable PDF to identify the main topic and key details of an informational text.
Other
Keys to Literacy: How to Write a Summary
Learn the seven steps to writing a summary of an informational text. Includes a summary template and completed examples.
Quia
Quia: Reading for Facts
This interactive quiz assesses students' reading comprehension skills of informational text passages. Students will read 30 short passages and answer question about a detail for each.
Annenberg Foundation
Annenberg Learner: Journey North: Reading Strategies: Paraphrase / Retell
Learn how to paraphrase a text by using a list of guiding questions.
Annenberg Foundation
Annenberg Learner: Journey North: Reading Strategies: Identify and Analyze Text Structure
Learn how to identify the text structures of chronological/sequence, cause/effect, problem/solution, compare/contrast, description, and directions by using a list of guiding questions.
Quia
Quia: Implied Main Idea
Read a short text and determine the main idea in this Battleship style learning game.
Quia
Quia: Main Idea 7th Grade Unit 1
Read a short text and then determine the main idea in this five question quiz.
Quia
Quia: Text Structure Practice Part #1
After reading key words and phrases, determine the correct text structure in this Rags to Riches style game.
Quia
Quia: Text Structures Rags to Riches
Read a short text and then choose the text structure in which it was written in this Rags to Riches style game.
Quia
Quia: Text Structure Rags to Riches
Read some signal words that would be found in a text and then choose the text structure that text would utilize in this Rags to Riches learning game.
Daily Teaching Tools
Daily Teaching Tools: Underlining for Comprehension
This Daily Teaching Tools resource provides a test taking strategy. Students will engage in underlining as they preview directions and texts. Students can continue with this strategy as they read.
AdLit
Ad lit.org: Classroom Strategies: Summarizing
Summarizing teaches students how to take a large selection of text and reduce it to the main points for a more concise understanding. Upon reading a passage, summarizing helps students learn to determine essential ideas and consolidate...