Objectives
This curriculum unit will provide me the opportunity to model voice for my students through reading children's picture books, poetry, and literature. The challenge I face in this unit is taking an abstract concept like voice and making it tangible for my students. To address this issue I plan to introduce the concept by using concrete examples of voice as heard and seen through picture books and progress slowly toward the more abstract expressions of voice including symbolic imagery and metaphor. This unit will teach voice through three different genres: picture books, poetry, and novels. The unit will take about three weeks to complete. Reading books and poetry that emphasize first person point of view will assist my students in making personal connections to the author's voice. In my classroom I refer to this connection as text-to-self — the student is able to dip into his or her own background knowledge and make a direct link with the text. At the end of this unit on voice the students will have a portfolio containing poetry, personal narrative, letters, and artistic expressions demonstrating their understanding of voice in self-expression. The student's final project will be the authoring and illustration of a picture book containing a personal narrative.
My primary objective for this unit is to enable my sixth grade students to demonstrate voice through their writing. Since I believe that reading and writing are totally interconnected, my goal will be to expose my students to written works that contain a lot of figurative language. Understanding figurative language will help the student to comprehend text and observe the author's use of it to develop voice in his or her writing.
The first standard for New Mexico Sixth Grade Language Arts is reading and listening for comprehension. 9 Simply translated, this standard expects that students will apply a variety of strategies and skills to comprehend information that is read, heard, and viewed. The Benchmark for this standard is to listen to, read, react to, and interpret information. I define information for this unit as poetry and literature. Exploring expressive materials that are read, heard, or viewed is a performance objective along with identifying figurative language in an oral selection. My curriculum unit will focus on these two performance objectives and culminate in the student writing a personal narrative in the form of a picture book. Usually the writing of a personal narrative is one of the first assignments sixth graders receive. However, I do not intend to give this assignment until the end of the unit. Students will be given many different activities to help practice using voice in their writing; it will not be until the end of the unit that I will have the expectation that students will be able to synthesize all that they have learned in order to develop a strong narrative illustrating mastery of voice in their own writing.
The second standard focuses on writing and speaking for expression, which essentially is saying that students will communicate effectively through speaking and writing. The benchmark I will focus on for this standard is the one that asks students to demonstrate competence in the skills and strategies of the writing process. As I mentioned in my rationale, the writing process is taught by using the 6 Traits of Writing assessment rubric. My goal is to teach all traits of writing throughout the year, but for the purpose of this curriculum unit I will focus more attention on voice; other traits will be taught in mini-lessons. The performance objective for written expression expects students to be able to compose a variety of writings that express individual perspectives drawn from personal experience through the writing process (drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading their own written work), using direct feedback from peers or peer editing, and writing for public and private audiences. The primary performance objective of producing writings that incorporate a definite voice (appropriate to the writing purpose) will be interspersed throughout the curriculum unit.
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