Writing and Reading Strategies for Informational Text

Informational reading standards are a huge component to the Common Core Reading standards. They are suppose to be taught in the other subject areas, but since ELA test scores only fall on the backs of English or core teachers, we have to ensure that our students have a strong foundation of these informational reading skills in middle school. We can’t depend on other teachers to teach this content for us.

To make your teaching life a little easier, we have created lessons that focus on directly teaching your students informational text reading strategies. These lessons include a presentation (keynote, Powerpoint, and PDF formats) that contains the basic elements of any good lesson: an anticipatory set, direct instruction, guided practice, assessment, and a reflection. We made many different graphic organizers and curated suggested text sets to use with each lesson. We sell each standard individually, but we also lumped them all together into a discounted bundle set.

These are tried and true lessons that we have revised and worked on for a handful of years now. They are dialed in and offer students a strong foundation in informational reading.

After we directly teach the informational reading standards, we then like to go into our informational writing unit. Bonus, we have also created a unit on Teachers Pay Teachers just for you to use with your students. Both of these units combined will keep you and your students busy for an entire month. We like to teach this informational unit after we have taught basic reading strategies like schema, questioning, inferring, visualizing, and determining importance. You can find us usually teaching this informational reading and writing unit in October. It creates a strong foundation for our media literacy unit, argument reading and writing unit, and our biography unit. We sell those units, too, in our TpT store.