Cougars

Information Text

Big Idea

Essential Question

Target Vocabulary

Comprehension

Target Skill

Main Ideas and Details - important, or major, ideas about the topic and facts or examples that tell more about main ideas.

Target Strategy

Monitor/Clarify - good readers monitor, or pay attention to, the main ideas and supporting details to help them understand and clarify text. Readers can clarify what they find confusing by reviewing text details.

Fluency

Stress - good readers stress, or emphasize, certain words as they read. Using stress properly helps readers understand and enjoy a text. Reading with no stress or incorrect stress can make it difficult to understand the meaning of the text. With practice, you can make reading more enjoyable and easier to understand by using appropriate stress.

Decoding

Recognizing Schwa + /r/ Sounds - the part of a word that sounds strongest in a multi-syllable word is the accented or stressed syllable; other syllables are unstressed. In many two-syllable words with an r-controlled vowel in the second syllable, the first syllable is stressed and the vowel and r in the second syllable make a schwa + /r/ sound. The schwa + /r/ sound rule doesn't apply to a stressed syllable.

Vocabulary Strategies

Analogies - are word problems that contain two pairs of words. The words in the first pair have a relationship to each other. The words in the second pair have a similar or the same relationship to one another as the words in the first pair. The key to solving an analogy is to figure out the relationship between the first pair of words and to apply it to the second pair. Sometimes the relationship may be that the words in the pair are synonyms and antonyms.

Grammar

Quotations - are the exact words a character or person says and are surrounded by quotation marks. When a direct quotation is a full sentence, the first word in capitalized. When other text comes before a direct quotation, a comma and a space come between the last word of the other text and the quotation mark. Sometimes writers split the dialogue, or what a character or person says, into two parts. Both speaking parts begin and end with quotation marks. Unless the second part begins with a proper noun, the first words in not capitalized. In between the split quotation the writer usually tells who is speaking and what the speaker is doing, or how she or he is speaking.

Writing

Write to Respond

Focus Trait: Sentence Fluency - improved sentence fluency will make a writer's opinion easier for readers to understand. To improve sentence fluency, writers combine choppy sentences and fix run-on sentences. In a response to literature, the topic sentence should be a clear opinion statement, or specific opinion about the text.