• COURSE OVEVIEW:

    Determining Word Meaning – Students learn different strategies to build on reading comprehension skills.

    Summarize Written Text – Students will summarize written text through the use of main ideas, recall of details, and analyzing paragraphs.

    Support Main Idea – Students will identify important details that enable them to answer questions. Lessons will so teach students how to determine the setting and mood of a story, and whether details are specific or general.

    Recognizing Relationships – Teaches students how to recognize the cause and effect of relationships in each passage. Students learn the skills of analysis through use of cause and effect and organizational patterns.

    Analyze Text – Teaches skills of analyzing literary texts. Students learn how to use inferences, draw conclusions, find the author’s purpose, understand themes, and discover the development of the plot.

    Evaluate Point of View – Teaches students how to evaluate the point of view in a story through facts and opinions, comparing and contrasting character changes, and determining the author’s point of view.

    Parts of Speech – Students will identify possessive nouns, verb tense, subject and verb agreement, the comparison of adjectives and adverbs, the placement and use of prepositional phrases, and the correct use of conjunctions to connect ideas

     

    READING ASSIGNMENTS

    Module 1 A Long Walk to Water
    Module 2A Lyddie

    Description

    Students explore the experiences of people of Southern Sudan during and after the Second Sudanese Civil War. They build proficiency in using textual evidence to support ideas in their writing, both in shorter responses and in an extended essay. They read "A Long Walk to Water", analyzing the points of view of the central characters, Salva and Nya. Students focus on one key theme: how individuals survive in challenging environments. The novel is paired with complex informational texts on Sudan.

    Students explore the issue of working conditions, historical and modern-day. They analyze how people, settings, and events interact in literary and informational texts. Students first focus on Lyddie (about a girl who works in the Lowell mills); they write an argument essay about Lyddie’s choices around joining a protest over working conditions. Then they read a speech by César Chávez (tracing how the sections of the text combine to build central claims) as they consider the role that workers, the government, and consumers play in improving working conditions.