5th Grade Historical Literacy Curriculum outlines the content of social-studies integrated units taught within the readers' and writers' workshop framework and taught daily for 90 minutes. Each six week unit contains standards, teaching points, vocabulary, and assessments. Readers' and writers' workshop naturally differentiates for all learners. By June of 2020, each unit will have a slide deck associated with it that contains the teaching points, integrated grammar work, vocabulary, and strategies for partner practice. Our district places careful emphasis on vocabulary, as we have a high percentage of English Language Learners.

Making Evidence-Based Claims ELA/Literacy Units empower students with a critical reading and writing skill at the heart of the Common Core: making evidence-based claims about complex texts. These units are part of the Developing Core Proficiencies Program. This unit develops students' €abilities to make evidence-based claims through activities based on a close reading of the Commencement Address Steve Jobs delivered at Stanford University on June, 2005.

Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .

This is a breakdown of the novel "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" and is set up to move slow.  It is set up so that students are able to recall events within each reading as they are directly taken from the book.  This could be printed off for students to fill out or could be up loaded to google classroom for students to fill in.  

In this eight-week module, students explore the idea of adversity of people across time and place, and through multiple modes of writing. Students begin this module with a research-based unit on the Middle Ages. They read informational articles about various aspects of medieval life, learning and practicing the skills of summarizing an article, analyzing how ideas are developed across a text, and describing how a part of a text contributes to the whole. Students then break into expert groups to read closely about one demographic group. They practice the informational reading skills they have learned and explore the adversities faced by that group. In the second half of Unit 1, students write an informational essay based on their research as their end of unit assessment. In Unit 2, students use their background knowledge built during Unit 1, but move to reading literature: Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village. This is a book of monologues told from the perspective of children living in the same village during the Middle Ages. Students have dual tasks: First, they identify the various adversities faced by this cast of characters; secondly, they examine the author’s craft, specifically by identifying and interpreting figurative language in the monologues as well as analyzing how word choices affect the tone of the text. In the second half of Unit 2, students write a literary argument to address the question “Do we struggle with the same adversities as the people of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!?” In Unit 3, students move into modern voices of adversity by reading concrete poems in the books Blue Lipstick and Technically, It’s Not My Fault. These concrete poems highlight adversities faced by the speakers of the poems, an adolescent girl and her younger brother. Students apply the same reading skills they learned in the reading of Unit 2, but this unit is discussion-based, allowing teachers to assess students’ speaking and listening skills in small group discussions about the texts. For their performance task, students choose a writing format—narrative, like the monologues of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, or concrete poem—and write their own text about adversities faced by sixth-graders. Students then perform their writing for a group of their peers.

Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .

Quill is our web-based tool that provides personalized, interactive writing lessons for middle school students. Each of the activities is built directly from the Common Core State Standards. Quill focuses on a single standard, and breaks it down into lessons that can be completed in 10-15 minutes. Grammar is an essential part of forming cohesive writing; it never exists in a vacuum. As such, in Quill's sentence writing activities, they require learners to rewrite the entire sentence correctly, not just choose a multiple choice answer or fill in the blank. The proofreading passages are filled with grammatical mistakes. In each of the passages, the student’s job is to identify and fix each of the errors. Quill then highlights the student’s own errors and provides a follow-up lesson on those particular subject areas. In both activities, students receive immediate feedback and are encouraged to repeat assignments until they achieve proficiency. Teachers can track which students are struggling with certain concepts and provide individualized instruction to suit their needs.