In this critical reading lesson, students analyze “Career Connections (Grades 6–8),” part of the AVID STEM Connections®, through a Double-Entry Journal to develop an understanding of STEM-related careers using the Says, Means, Matters instructional practice. This lesson uses the WICOR® (Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, Organization, Reading) methodology and strategies from AVID’s curriculum library and is designed for a variety of learning environments.
All students need to be introduced to STEM experiences at an early age to build the foundation they will need for future careers. Most careers will require people to think critically and creatively, to collaborate with others, and to solve real-world problems.
AVID STEM Connections offers grab-and-go lesson plans and ancillary materials to support teachers and students, making it easy to incorporate STEM experiences into daily classroom activities across content areas for grades K–8.
Bring AVID STEM Connections to your classroom with a complimentary, year-long trial subscription for the 2021–2022 school year! Subscribe here.
Learning Objective
- Students will analyze content to make inferences and generalize information related to the text.
What You’ll Need
- AVID STEM Connections: Career Connections
- AVID Weekly lesson
- Additional resources can be found on the AVID Weekly website by subscription only.
Activate
Establish a purpose for reading, build background knowledge, and set students up for success.
Plan for reading by thinking through or having students respond to the following questions and identify how the chosen text fits within the broader context of your instructional unit so that students are making connections to their prior knowledge.
- Do other texts need to be read to build background knowledge?
- How does the text fit into the overall instructional unit or overall learning experience?
This text meets the following features of an ideal text:
- This text develops key content or academic thinking skills.
- This text contains balanced perspective or multiple viewpoints.
- This text provides students with the opportunity to develop disciplinary literacy through content-specific academic language development and analytical thinking.
- Engagement with this text fosters inquiry and curiosity.
Allow students an opportunity to set up their notes and record the Essential Question before engaging in the learning. Students will be interpreting and analyzing nonlinguistic representations in this lesson.
Engage
Build vocabulary and engage in purposeful rereads. Vocabulary development can happen at any point in the reading process.
Students will build vocabulary using a List-Group-Label, looking at both academic and content-area words. They will process information in a first and second read of the text and engage in a purposeful reread using the Double-Entry Journal strategy.
Extend
Reading tasks should be directly connected to what students will do with the text after they have read and understand it.
Students will use the text to develop the Analyze academic thinking skill. They will extend beyond the text by using the Says, Means, Matters strategy.
*Explore the sample lesson and contact AVID Care by phone at (833) 284-3227 or by email at [email protected] for more information about AVID Weekly® and AVID Elementary Weekly.