Details and examples are one of those areas that students have struggled with when writing. Being able to cite details and examples is a skill that is valuable in reading, writing, thinking, and speaking. What are some of the things we might want to make sure students learn when we ask them to think about details and examples? We might want them to know what kinds of things are details: facts, quotes, statistics, firgurative language, the information in a visual, sensory details, and more. We also want students to know some of the things they can do with details: compare and contrast ideas, support a point of view, oppose a point of view, make a decision, describe a character, make inferences, make prediections, and more. As always, I’ve got a pdf copy for you – just print it out and share it with your students (and fellow educators).
Category: Concept attainment
Content Card – Solving Algebraic Expressions
Another one completed!
Click here to get the pdf. Don’t forget to run this on one sheet of paper for a one-pager (front and back) content card.
An Activity to Help Students Write Conclusions
Have you ever struggled with helping students write a good conclusion? This is a simple and powerful activity I designed to help students understand the difference. Download the pdf of the strategy, which includes directions, a template, and an answer sheet for this activity. I designed this for the elementary level, but this is easily adapted to the secondary level by using more sophisticated examples. The Hot Miss phrase is from Amy Hooper, a wonderful teacher at Axton Elementary in Virginia.
Content Card – Bar Graph
This content card is designed for elementary school students. If you like this one, just let me know and I’ll add to the content for middle and high school students.
Content Card – Measuring Length
If you’ve ever worked with me, you know the importance I place on the content that students learn. Of course we want students to think deeply, but we want them to think deeply about something – the content we want them to learn. Here’s another example of a content card – this one for fourth-grade mathematics. This one is for measuring length in U.S. customary units. A content card for measuring length in metric units will be next. Don’t forget to subscribe to my blog and you’ll automatically be notified when I make any posts.
Download a pdf copy of the content card.
I’ve also included a list of analysis questions for this content card. Remember that the purpose of the analysis questions is to help students learn to work with the information on the card. There are two pages to the following download.
Download a pdf of the Analysis Questions for the Content 
Card, Measuring Length.
Content Card – Scatterplots
One part of unpacking standards is clarifying what it is we want students to learn. It is not enough to simply look at nouns and verbs in curricular statements; we’ve got to go beyond that and figure out the specific content that students must learn.
One way to do this is to make a content card using Frayer’s Model for vocabulary development. The idea of using the model is to figure out the key content students should learn for a standard. The visual below is a content card that I finished today.
Download a copy Content Card, Scatterplot.
To get to the information for the card, I reviewed the following for a standard from the Commonwealth of Virginia: Standards of Learning for Mathematics, Curriculum Framework, Enhanced Scope and Sequence, and Released Assessments.
I enjoy working with these and I’ll continue to post any that I do.
Math Operations Chart
This is a Math Operations Chart you may want to use to help students learn key vocabulary related to basic math operations.
I also designed a brief teacher’s sheet with notes to go along with this. The teacher’s sheet has questions you can use with students to help them learn to read and use the chart.
Things to Download