Appendix on Implementing District Standards
My district uses the Common Core State Standards, and I specifically use the Grade 7 English Language Arts Standards. Those listed below come from sub-categories Reading: Literature, Reading: Informational Text, Writing, and Speaking & Listening.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.7.1 & CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.7.1: Cite several pieces of textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text. 87
Students will read, synthesize, and quote information from literary and informational texts throughout this unit. They will be reading from essays, plays, speeches, and songs, as well as websites, journal articles, and books in order to practice their own critical literacy, as well as researching the critical literacies of others.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.7.3: Analyze the interactions between individuals, events, and ideas in a text (e.g., how ideas influence individuals or events, or how individuals influence ideas or events).88
In their research, students will be focusing heavily on how the experiences of the creators they are studying impacted their creation of certain texts. For example, students learning about Lorraine Hansberry’s childhood in Chicago or her first viewing of Juno and the Paycock will have to explain how those events influenced her ideas about the world for her to write A Raisin in the Sun.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.7.7: Conduct short research projects to answer a question, drawing on several sources and generating additional related, focused questions for further research and investigation. & CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.7.8: Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, using search terms effectively; assess the credibility and accuracy of each source; and quote or paraphrase the data and conclusions of others while avoiding plagiarism and following a standard format for citation.89
The bulk of the independent work that students will be doing in this unit is research. They will receive guidance, but ultimately it will be their responsibility to locate and utilize the appropriate information to respond to their research question. They will be synthesizing what they learn from reading their paired texts, as well as information they gather from websites, books, etc. in their presentations.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.7.9: Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research90
Students will be utilizing textual evidence from various sources to support their research findings, as well as when they answer the questions I have paired with each text we will read.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.7.5: Include multimedia components and visual displays in presentations to clarify claims and findings and emphasize salient points.91
Students’ final projects for this unit will be incomplete if they do not include sound, video, or images to support their research. They may choose to include pictures that compare and contrast costuming choices, or they may include songs from the different musicals. However, regardless of what media they choose to include, a major part of the work they will be doing is curating artifacts that help their audience understand the connections between the paired texts.
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