This is a team-created, standards-based rubric for informative/explanatory analytical writing with "I can" statements as well as space for comments.
This is a team-created, standards-based rubric for narrative writing with "I can" statements as well as space for comments.
Students write an analysis essay to identify and explain the rhetorical strategies utilized in a famous speech that make it an effective argument.
After reading To Kill a Mockingbird, students will continue to study the theme of taking a stand as they finish the novel. They will develop their argument writing skills through scaffolded writing lessons, culminating in a literary analysis essay in which they argue whether or not it made sense, based on Atticus’s character, for him to have taken a stand and defend Tom Robinson.
After studying utopian literature, students design their own utopian society, publishing the explanation of their ideal world on a blog. As they blog about their utopia, students establish the habits, practices, and organizing social structures that citizens will follow in their utopian societies. They begin by brainstorming ideas about what a perfect society would be like and then, in groups, begin to plan their project. Next, they become familiar with the blogging process, including legal guidelines and the specific site they will be using. Over several class sessions, students work on their blogs comparing their work to a rubric. Finally, after students visit one another's blogs and provide constructive and supportive feedback, they reflect on their own work. The lesson plan includes alternative handouts for classrooms where computer or blog access is limited. In this alternative, students complete the same basic activities, but publish their work using a Flip Book.
*students will use brainstorming and mind mapping tools/activities to outline their writing process; they will use the following: bubbl.us--this is a mind-mapping tool
This unit focuses on aspects of argumentation
involving evidence, reasoning, and logic, rather
than on persuasive writing and speaking. Students are first expected to understand objectively a
complex issue through exploratory inquiry and
close reading of information on the topic, then
study multiple perspectives on the issue before
they establish their own position. From their
reading and research, they are asked to craft an
argumentative plan that explains and supports
their position, acknowledges the perspectives and
positions of others, and uses evidence gleaned
through close reading and analysis to support
their claims.
In my English 10 classroom, students spend several weeks deciding on, researching, and writing about a career of their choosing. As part of this, they are expected to interview someone that is in their career field and learn more about what is required to have this job. Students also will create an infographic about their career, as well as a presentation that they will present to their peers. Attached is the unit plan for this project.
The lesson and activities teach students to recognize and explore bias and media stereotyping and be able to identify and analyze propaganda techniques in magazine and//or TV advertising.
This is a resource for a student to use in picking out a choice book. It allows recording space for several brief interactions with books as well as easy ways to recall information via multiple learning styles.
In this lesson, high school students look critically at the literary work "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe and its 1961 film interpretation. They use prediction strategies to form and refine their opinions about the story line progression in each work. They read the short story, screen the film, discuss reactions to both works, and plan and write a persuasive essay analyzing the validity of the film interpretation. This lesson is ideally suited for students who have experience with persuasive writing, and it can be adapted to work with any literature-film pairing.
When students write argumentative or persuasive essays, they often ignore the viewpoints of their opponents, the potential readers of their essays. In this minilesson, students respond to a hypothetical situation by writing about their position on the subject. After sharing their thoughts with the class, students consider the opposite point of view and write about arguments for that position. They then compare their position with that of their potential audience, looking for areas of overlap. They then revise their arguments, with the audience's point of view and areas of commonality in mind. Examining the opposing view allows students to better decide how to counter their opponent logically, perhaps finding common ground from which their arguments might grow. Thus, the activity becomes a lesson not only in choosing arguments but also in anticipating audience reaction and adapting to it.
What is scary, and why does it fascinate us? How do writers and storytellers scare us? This lesson plan invites students to answer these questions by exploring their own scary stories and scary short stories and books. The lesson culminates in a Fright Fair, where students share scary projects that they have created, including posters, multimedia projects, and creative writing.
In Module 10.1, students engage with literature and nonfiction texts and explore how complex characters develop through their interactions with each other, and how these interactions develop central ideas such as parental and communal expectations, self-perception and performance, and competition and learning from mistakes.
Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .
In this module, students will read, discuss, and analyze contemporary and classic texts, focusing on how complex characters develop through interactions with one another and how authors structure text to accomplish that development. There will be a strong emphasis on reading closely and responding to text dependent questions, annotating text, and developing academic vocabulary in context.
Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .
In this module, students engage with literature and nonfiction texts that develop central ideas of guilt, obsession, and madness, among others. Building on work with evidence-based analysis and debate in Module 1, students will produce evidence-based claims to analyze the development of central ideas and text structure. Students will develop and strengthen their writing by revising and editing, and refine their speaking and listening skills through discussion-based assessments.
Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .
This lesson is used for discussion of a novel read by the whole class. Working individually and in groups, using symbols, drawings, shapes, and colors, alongside words and quotations, students construct a graphic of their section of the novel using an online tool and then on newsprint or butcher paper with crayons or markers. When all groups have completed their graphics, they will present them to the class, explaining why they chose the elements they used. Finished graphics can be displayed on a class bulletin board, on walls, or on a Web page. Finally, students will write an individual essay analyzing one element of the novel.
Students read a work of realistic fiction about bullying and gain understanding through writing, Readers Theatre, and discussion.
This webfolio is a follow-up assignment to an Honors English unit on Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achiebe. In this webfolio, students will take on the role of social scientists interested in learning more about the life of Africans in different parts of the continent. They will each have different aspects of African culture and life to research.The webfolio format emphasizes the power of teamwork and the Internet to learn all about an area of Africa. Each team will learn about one region of the continent, and then they will come together to get a better understanding of Africa as a whole by participating in and observing classroom presentations. The culminating project combines individual research and informational genre format into a first-person travel diary, imagining an actual trip through each region of Africa.
"The Lady Sings the Blues" is a multi-modal murder mystery project created as a model for use with freshmen in their final writing unit for Honors English. In a multi-modal writing project, students can incorporate images, sound (music, podcasts, voice-overs), video, animation, clip art, etc. into their writing. Students will create and publish a variety of genres which will each give clues for the reader to discover "who done it."