RE09 Curriculum Map
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August
Content and Essential Skills
- Unit 1: Facing Monsters
- Students will read short stories centered on the theme Facing Monsters. Selections include A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, The Interlopers by Saki, and an excerpt from Black Boy by Richard Wright.
- How can I make meaning when I read a short story (or other works of lit.)?
- How can I use context clues to determine a word's meaning?
-Why is it that so many of our stories deal with conflict? (The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.--Thomas Paine)
Skills
Students will:
•Identify exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.
•Understand cause and effect.
•Use the active voice of verbs.
•Analyze a surprise ending.
•Use transitional words.
•Find thematic connections across genres.
•Understand and use new words.
Assessment
Students will:
•Respond to literature in writing, answering questions provided in the text book.
•Participate in class discussions, revealing their understanding of the text.
•Map the plot of the excerpt from Black Boy, identifying the exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution.
•Complete a multiple choice test over the elements of plot.
•Complete margin notes of the Student Work Text, which requires them to interpret, analyze and make predictions.
Resources
Holt, Rinehart, Winston Elements of Literature, third course
Teacher's Edition
Student texts
Student Worktexts
Supporting Materials (Formal Assessment masters, Language Link masters, etc.)
Optional
September
Content and Essential Skills
- Unit 2: The Human Spirit
- Students will read short stories centered on the theme The Human Spirit. Selections will be Thank You Ma'am by Langston Hughes, and Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.
- Students will focus on the literary elements setting and character.
- Essential Questions:
- What are we (humans) capable of? Must a hero be extraordinary, or can heroism be found in "ordinary" acts of kindness?
- Introduction to Poetry
- Students will read a wide variety of poetry, learning to identify and interpret literary elements and poetic devices.
- Selections include: Daily by Naomi Shihab Nye, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer by Walt Whitman, Fog by Carl Sandburg, I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud by William Wordsworth, Southbound on the Freeway by May Swenson, Kidnap Poem by Nikki Giovanni, The Seven Ages of Man by William Shakespeare, Fire and Ice by Robert Frost, Women by Alice Walker, My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Roethke, Fifteen by William Stafford, American Hero by Essex Hemphill, The Puppy by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harlem by Langston Hughes, 'Hope' Is the Thing With Feathers by Emily Dickinson, Legal Alien by Pat Mora, The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, Lucinda Matlock by Edgar Lee Masters, and Ain't I a Woman? by Sojourner Truth.
-Essential Questions:
- How does poetry provide a record of the human experience?
- Is it important to search for truth and/or beauty in our lives?
- How can we use words to create art that survives time?
- How does art (particularly poetry) enhance our human experience?
Skills
Students will:
•Analyze characters
-recognize methods of characterization
•Make inferences
-using details provided by the author, describe characters
•Recognize the role of setting in literature
-define setting
-identify setting in several works
-analyze the effect of setting
•Recognize satire
-identify what aspect of humanity/society is being satirized
-define satire
•Evaluate the author's point of view
•Identify and correct misplaced modifiers
Students will:
•Identify literary elements with special emphasis on imagery, figures of speech, rhythm, rhyme and other sound effects, and tone
•Apply a variety of reading strategies to poetry with emphasis on making a poem the reader's own
•Respond to poetry using a variety of modes
•Identify, define and create fixed form poems - English sonnets, haiku, limericks
Assessment
-Informal Assessments include:
classroom discussion
notebook writing
-Formal Assessments:
Worksheet - misplaced modifiers
Written answers to questions found in text
Quizzes - reading comprehension
Workbook - margin notes; respond to lit.
-Informal Assessment:
classroom discussion
notebook writing
-Formal Assessment:
Test - define and recognize all poetry terms
Quizzes - short, multiple choice quizzes over each literary element singly
Real World assignment:
-students identify 10 similes and 10 metaphors in their everyday lives
Fruit Poetry assignment:
students use similes and metaphors to describe a piece of fruit poetically
-Sonnet/Limericks assignment:
students write an original sonnet and 2 original limericks
Resources
See August 2004
Optional
October
Content and Essential Skills
- Unit 7: The Destruction of Innocence
Students will read Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.
Essential Questions:
-What can anyone tell you about love?
-Why does love make people do strange things?
-How do the young lovers in the play learn that hopes can be ruined and innocence destroyed, in part by the very people they trust the most?
-How does Romeo's character/personality contribute to his ultimate downfall?
-How do circumstances (fate, destiny, coincidence, chance) conspire to destroy R and J?
Skills
Students will:
•Read a Shakespeare play.
•Interpret literary elements, with special emphasis on the five-part structure of Shakespearean tragedy.
•Analyze and read aloud dialogue written in verse.
•Recognize and define unrhymed iambic pentameter.
•Apply a variety of reading strategies to the play, with special emphasis on reading Shakespeare's poetry and using paraphrasing and context clues to check understanding of the text.
•Learn about Shakespeare's life and the history of the Globe Theater.
•Express understanding through expository writing.
Assessment
Informal Assessment:
- Classroom discussion
- notebook writing
Formal Assessment:
- Worksheets after each act
-Quizzes to determine reading comprehension
-Test over the play as a whole
-Essay
Resources
See August 2004
Romeo and Juliet teaching guide
Romeo and Juliet movie (1995)
Optional
November
Content and Essential Skills
- Unit 4: Discoveries
- Students will read short stories centered on the theme "Discoveries," including Marigolds by Eugenia Collier, American History by Judith Ortiz Cofer, and The Scarlet Ibis. - Essential Questions:
- How can a story present a truth to its readers?
- How do our perspectives change as we grow up, learn from our mistakes, or experience disappointments?
- As our eyes are opened to new possibilities, what truths are revealed to us?
- Are people always what they seem?
-Do negative emotions such as guilt, regret, envy and pride have the power to take over our lives?
Skills
Students will:
- Identify and analyze literary elements with special emphasis on theme.
- Connect a story's title to its theme.
- Analyze internal conflict.
- Identify key passages.
- Identify figures of speech - simile, metaphor, personification.
- Interpret theme.
- Understand and use new words.
Assessment
Informal Assessment:
- Class discussion
- Notebook writing
- Workbooks
Formal Assessment:
- written answers to questions in text
- worksheets - simile, metaphor, personification review
- quizzes-reading comprehension, mult. choice
Resources
Elements of Literature, third course (Holt, Rinehart and Winston)
Optional
December
Content and Essential Skills
- Unit 5: The Perilous Journey
- Students will read selections from The Odyssey by Homer.
- Essential Questions:
- Why have we always looked at the horizon and wondered what's out there?
- What is it about human nature that keeps us journeying into the unknown?
- What kind of people are inspiring, and how do they fuel the imagination of others?
Skills
- Students will:
- Read and interpret the epic.
- Define and identify the major elements of an epic and the epic hero.
- Identify Homeric similes.
- Interpret and create epithets.
- Express understanding through critical thinking and creative writing.
- Draw connections between the "oldest literature of Western civilization" and some of our current forms of entertainment (Star Wars, O Brother Where Art Thou?).
- Recognize the role of literature in teaching morality to the youth of a culture.
Assessment
Informal Assessment:
- Classroom discussion
- Notebook writing
Formal Assessment:
- 2 sets of questions from the text
- Test
Resources
see August 2004
O Brother Where Art Thou? video
Optional
January
Content and Essential Skills
Skills
Assessment
Resources
Optional
February
Content and Essential Skills
Skills
Assessment
Resources
Optional
March
Content and Essential Skills
Skills
Assessment
Resources
Optional
April
Content and Essential Skills
Skills
Assessment
Resources
Optional
May
Content and Essential Skills
Skills
Assessment
Resources
Optional
