Appendix: Incorporating Common Core State Standards
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.2 Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.
This standard can be achieved through any and all the literature incorporated into this unit. Most apt are the letters of Mr. Baldwin and Dr. King.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including words with multiple meanings or language that is particularly fresh, engaging, or beautiful. (Include Shakespeare as well as other authors.)
This standard is achieved in both the strategies and classroom activities related to Jacob Lawrence’s art (in writing poetry as a reaction) and Langston Hughes’ poems (in poetry analysis).
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.5 Analyze how an author's choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.
In The Color of Water, McBride incorporates tragedy and comedy. It is an apt novel to explore author’s choices in structure, as it involves flashback and even transition of POV and narrator.
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