Monica Almeida/The New York TimesHow does a bad economy affect
businesses like Phoenix Decorating in Pasadena? We’re using this
and other articles as models of writing about cause and effect.
Go to related article » Update | Sept. 2012: We’ll be exploring
the new Common Core State Standards, and how teaching with The
Times can address them, through a series of blog posts. You can
find them all here, in the lesson plan category “Common Core.”
Last summer we took our first stab at thinking about how the
Common Core Standards might apply to what we do on The Learning
Network. In that post, we offered suggestions for literacy
strategies that we know work well with “informational text” — a
category that includes pretty much everything The Times
publishes every day. Now we’d like to elaborate on that with
more ideas for helping students understand common expository
“text structures” like cause and effect, compare and contrast
and problem-solution. These three, especially, are such staples
of journalism that you can