Writing About Nature

Appendix on Implementing District Standards

Suggested Instructional Sequence

For each of the activities above I envision being completed during one sixty minute instructional period. There are 15 activities listed above, so I imagine roughly three weeks of work to understand consider nature while working through the activities. The fourth week of the unit would be reserved for writing an essay in which students draw from their reading and unpacking of Nature’s Best Hope: How You Can Save the World in Your Own Yards to explain ways that they can act as stewards of the natural world.

Common Core Standards Addressed

There are a number of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) at the heart of instructional planning for this unit. In the first part of the unit, there is a heavy emphasis on improving aspects of narration. CCSS W.6.3 states, “Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.”⁴³ This standard is addressed because we will look at how professional writers use sensory details in order to create imagery in the reader’s mind. We will explore these pieces so that students have exemplars to produce their own writing from the observations they make while outside.

In the third phase of the unit, students will write read significant chunks of rigorous nonfiction text from the text Nature’s Best Hope: How You Can Save the World in Your Own Yards. Each one of the questions I will use contained within the chart aligns to a nonfiction Common Core State Standard (CCSS). In question one about the author’s POV that ties to CCSS R.I 6.6 in which students need to show mastery in determining an author’s POV or purpose in a text. The second question ties to R.I. 6.1 in which students need to cite textual evidence to justify their answers. The third question has students question the author’s use of word choice; this directly connects to R.I 6.4 in which students need to determine the meaning of words including the connotative and technical meanings of words. The fourth question has students consider the structure the author uses to construct the arguments; this ties to R.I 6.3 in which students must determine how a key individual, event or idea is introduced, illustrated, and elaborated in a text. Students will show mastery of that by identifying nonfiction text structures employed by the author to organize ideas. The last question has students reflect on relevance and application of what they have learned. This ties to R.I 6.10; students need to read and comprehend literary nonfiction in the 6-8 text complexity band proficiently. The last standard is very important because I want my students not only to understand what is going on with climate; my hope is that they are also inspired enough to do something and apply what they learn to start address our collective impacts on the environment.⁴⁴

All of this careful reading work is done to build student capacity as writers. The same worksheets that we use to unpack each chapter can be used to build their essays in which they explain what they can do to help improve climate change. This directly aligns with W.6.2 which calls for students to be able to write informative or explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas.⁴⁵ This unit covers a number of other standards, but I wanted the connections to be clear for the strongest articulation across the standards being addressed.