This new EDSITEment lesson provides a Common Core application for high school students for Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart. They will undertake close reading of passages in Things Fall Apart to evaluate the impact of Achebe’s literary techniques.

A California Guide to Align Civic Education and the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects. This resource guide provides educators with practices to equip all students with reading, writing, listening and speaking skills and the knowledge, skills and dispositions to become responsible engaged citizens of the 21st century in a coherent, integrated manner that will be meaningful and relevant. The practices in the guide provide civic education approaches to meet the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts. The lesson activities in each of the grade spans follow a natural progression that builds students’ historical knowledge of the foundations of democracy, an understanding of how America’s constitutional principles are reinterpreted over time, and the skills and dispositions needed for effective citizenship. Applied knowledge of history, government and civics is necessary for developing civic competency. Therefore, each series of lessons calls for students to actively participate in activities that strengthen reading, writing, speaking and listening skills in the context of civic dialogue, debate, persuasion and action.

Percussionist Steven Angel has developed an innovative program that uses rhythm to help struggling students improve their reading fluency and comprehension. Deceptively simple -- a facilitator taps out a basic rhythm while students read aloud -- the method relaxes students, helps them focus, and is effective in after-school intervention programs as well as traditional classrooms.

This paper opens a larger conversation about what must be done to realize opportunities presented by the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and the literacy standards in other subject areas. It emphasizes the simultaneous challenges and opportunities for ELLs.The paper emphasizes that texts are approached differently for different purposes. Students need opportunities to approach texts with these varied purposes in mind. It also highlights how ELLs may be well served by opportunities to explore and justify their own textual hypotheses, even if their initial interpretations diverge from those of the teacher.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important aspects of the task and its potential use.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important aspects of the task and its potential use.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important aspects of the task and its potential use.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important aspects of the task and its potential use.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important aspects of the task and its potential use.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important aspects of the task and its potential use.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important aspects of the task and its potential use.

Student collaboration is key to success in college and career, and the Common Core standards for Speaking and Listening include collaboration standards. These standards focus on collaboration in multiple settings and ask students to be prepared and respectful, and to engage in problem-solving in formal and informal situations.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important aspects of the task and its potential use.

Even among educators who have been successful at educating ELLs under traditional supports and programs, the level of knowledge required to do the job successfully has increased. This paper considers more aggressive and creative capacity-building initiatives that strengthen and integrate the disciplinary teaching strategies with literacy and language development strategies. The authors discuss the value and implications of new partnerships, of structures for collaboration, and of time dedicated to engaging experts from different fields in the design and delivery of teacher preparation and professional development.

What does it look like to read a high-quality work of literary non-fiction? This presents a picture of how to present an in-depth analysis and discussion of Dr. King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Examples are drawn from specific, well-argued paragraphs, with an explanation of the cognitive requirements of the Standards.

Requiring students to preview a topic prior to discussing a difficult text or challenging topic aids student comprehension and allows for deeper discussion. In this activity, 8th grade students respond in writing to quotes from a book independently and then rotate from one quote to another responding to additional quotes or student responses.Students share their thoughts and predictions during a whole class discussion using quotes to support their thinking. Individual reflection closes the lesson and prepares students for the next days reading by asking students to predict the theme or storyline based on the quotes and class discussion.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important aspects of the task and its potential use.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important aspects of the task and its potential use.

In this lesson students will learn about weather by taking walks in various types conditions: sunny, rainy, windy and snowy.

This paper addresses the implications, for ELLs, of the new standard's requirement that students be able to read and understand complex, informationally dense texts. The authors discuss the types of supports that learners need in order to work with complex texts. They also provide a sample of what academic discourse involves, using an excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail. They demonstrate how English learners can be provided with strategies for accessing complex texts, such as closely examining one sentence at a time. The authors argue that instruction must go beyond vocabulary and should begin with an examination of our beliefs about language, literacy and learning.