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.

This sequence of lessons is based on text-dependent questions that are answered through a close reading of the article, "Girl Power" from the Washington Post's Kids' Post.

This resource is a teacher guiding students through using close reading strategies to determine the main idea and details from an informational piece of text.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" demonstrates that even the smallest punctuation mark signals a stylistic decision, distinguishing one writer from another and enabling an author to move an audience. In this minilesson, students first explore Dr. King's use of semicolons and their rhetorical significance. They then apply what they have learned by searching for ways to follow Dr. King's model and use the punctuation mark in their own writing. Note that while this lesson refers to the "Letter from Birmingham Jail," any text which features rhetorically significant use of semicolons can be effective for this minilesson.

In this module, students are involved in a deep study of mythology, its purposes, and elements. Students will read Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief (780L), a high-interest novel about a sixth-grade boy on a hero’s journey. Some students may be familiar with this popular fantasy book; in this module, students will read with a focus on the archetypal journey and close reading of the many mythical allusions. As they begin the novel, students also will read a complex informational text that explains the archetypal storyline of the hero’s journey which has been repeated in literature throughout the centuries. Through the close reading of literary and informational texts, students will learn multiple strategies for acquiring and using academic vocabulary. Students will also build routines and expectations of discussion as they work in small groups. At the end of Unit 1, having read half of the novel, students will explain, with text-based evidence, how Percy is an archetypal hero. In Unit 2, students will continue reading The Lightning Thief (more independently): in class, they will focus on the novel’s many allusions to classic myths; those allusions will serve as an entry point into a deeper study of Greek mythology. They also will continue to build their informational reading skills through the close reading of texts about the close reading of texts about the elements of myths. This will create a conceptual framework to support students’ reading of mythology. As a whole class, students will closely read several complex Greek myths. They then will work in small groups to build expertise on one of those myths. In Unit 3, students shift their focus to narrative writing skills. This series of writing lessons will scaffold students to their final performance task in which they will apply their knowledge about the hero’s journey and the elements of mythology to create their own hero’s journey stories.

What are “rules to live by”? How do people formulate and use “rules” to improve their lives? How do people communicate these “rules” to others? In this module, students consider these questions as they read the novel Bud, Not Buddy, Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, President Barack Obama’s Back-to-School Speech, “If” by Rudyard Kipling, and informational research texts. At the start of Unit 1, students launch their study of Bud, Not Buddy, establishing a set of routines for thinking, writing, and talking about Bud’s rules to live by. They read the novel closely for its figurative language and word choice, analyzing how these affect the tone and meaning of the text. In the second half of the unit, students engage in a close reading of the Steve Jobs speech, focusing on how Jobs develops his ideas at the paragraph, sentence, and word level. Students use details from the speech to develop claims about a larger theme. During Unit 2, students continue to explore the theme of “rules to live by” in the novel as well as through close reading of the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling. Students analyze how the structure of a poem contributes to its meaning and theme. In a mid-unit assessment, students compare and contrast how Bud, Not Buddy and “If” address a similar theme. Unit 2 culminates with students writing a literary argument essay in which they establish a claim about how Bud uses his “rules”: to survive or to thrive. Students substantiate their claim using specific text-based evidence including relevant details and direct quotations from the novel. In Unit 3, students shift their focus to their own rules to live by and conduct a short research project. Students work in expert groups (research teams) to use multiple informational sources to research that topic. As a final performance task, students use their research to write an essay to inform about one important “rule to live by” supported with facts, definitions, concrete details, quotations, and examples.

History teacher Jodi Hoard, leads her 6th grade students through a close reading of an informational text and models how to find key ideas and details within it. She builds off of previous text annotation skills students' have and introduces a graphic organizer where they can record important information while reading.

In this lesson students will observe and read about microorganisms so that they can create an information book on microorganisms.

John Schumacher (aka Mr. Schu) is a blogger, a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, and the Ambassador of School Libraries for Scholastic Book Fairs®. You could say every day is a giant book party for this teacher-librarian! In fact, Library Journal named him "The Xtreme Librarian" for the high level of exertion – along with some gears and stunts – he uses to get kids reading, and Instructor Magazinenamed him a Cool Teacher for redefining what it means to be a teacher-librarian.
This resource is a link to his Blog. The Blog hosts children's book trailers he has created. He explains "how" he created them.

Students explore the legal and ethical dimensions of respecting creative work. First, they learn a basic foundation of legal principles and vocabulary related to copyright. They understand how such factors as the rules of copyright law, the values and intent of the original creator, and the audience and purpose should affect their decisions about using the creative work of others. Using the Mad Men Student Handout, students then apply these principles to a simulation activity in which they act as advertising executives who have to choose a photo for an ad campaign.

This 18 day unit explicitly teaches text structures, summary, text features, reading informational text about Mesopotamia, and writing a book about Mesopotamia. Instruction moves from high scaffolding to moderate scaffolding to independent practice as students become familiar with the various text structures, how to identify them, what graphic organizer will work with each text structure, how to use notes recorded in graphic organizers to write summaries, and how to compile an informational book. Mesopotamia is the content used as an anchor.

Students explore the concept of fair use, apply it to case studies, and
create an original work of fair use.
Students learn how to judge whether something is protected by fair use
by using the Four Points of Fair Use Student Handout. They
apply the four points of fair use to two case studies, a remixed video and
a mash-up song, to judge whether or not they fall under fair use.
Students then create an original work of fair use by reworking
copyrighted material to create a collage or a remix video.

These lessons will introduce students to the THIEVES strategy for previewing textbooks and non-fiction articles.  The acronym stands for:
T- Title
H - Headings
I - Introduction
E - Every first sentence in a paragraph
V - Visuals and Vocabulary
E - End of chapter questions
S - Summary
Teacher will model, students will practice with a partner and then use the strategy independently.  These short lessons could be applied to any textbook or article in a middle school classroom.