A Very Large Expanse of Sea
By: Tahereh Mafi

It’s 2002, a year after 9/11. It’s an extremely turbulent time politically, but especially so for someone like Shirin, a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl who’s tired of being stereotyped. Shirin is never surprised by how horrible people can be.

Student with biodiversity poster

Student-generated questions are questions that students write before, during, or after engaging in a lesson or reading a text.

Student holding science card

The sentence expansion strategy teaches students how to write more detailed complex and compound sentences.

Coral reef starting to bleach

Sentence combining is a strategy that teaches students to write detail-rich sentences with more complexity.

Service dog on a harness

Sentence deconstruction is a strategy that helps students break down dense and lengthy sentences found in academic texts.

Water Cycle in English

An annotated diagram is a visual that includes labels for each part of an image, text, or diagram that students are using in content-area instruction.

Boreal forest on map

Engineering a text is a strategy that embeds scaffolds and supports directly into grade-level text in order to increase student comprehension.

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