Making the Common Core fit with pre-CCSS curriculum: Informational Text

I've been reading about so many people who absolutely hate the new Common Core standards. It makes me wonder what are they seeing that I am not.  Is it a lack of training from the district/administrative level?  Is it a lack of materials that match the standards?  Perhaps I am in a district with an abundance of support.  I have enjoyed learning the new standards.  It's been fun for me to find new ways to deliver the same old curriculum. 

Below are some pictures from a lesson I did on water directly from our Science text.  The students enjoyed the "coloring" and recreating the graphics the authors used while taking notes in our foldable.  Note, the graphics are directly from the text books.  

Our Science chapter was called The Water Cycle.  I took a 12x18 sheet of white paper and did the shutter fold, then cut the "windows" so that I would have four. We labeled them for each subsection in the lesson.

From the Common Core State Standards:

Key Ideas and Details

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.5.1 Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.5.2 Determine two or more main ideas of a text and explain how they are supported by key details; summarize the text.

• Craft and Structure

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.5.4 Determine the meaning of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases in a text relevant to a grade 5 topic or subject area.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.5.5 Compare and contrast the overall structure (e.g., chronology, comparison, cause/effect, problem/solution) of events, ideas, concepts, or information in two or more texts.

We quoted from the text, we determined the main ideas of each subsection, and we summarized.  In addition, we worked with domain-specific words and worked with the structures the authors used to deliver the information to us.  I used the CCSS when planning the delivery of this lesson.  Science is pretty easy to fit into the new standards.  I'll do the same in the next post with our very outdated Open Court story.  

 I LOVED this idea from Runde's Room using this block number to limit the students to the number of words used in the summary.  We did this for the first subsection of The Water Cycle lesson.  It really held them down to key details and they could not include too many details.