Emily Dickinson's poetry often reveals a child-like fascination with the natural world. She writes perceptively of butterflies, birds, and bats and uses lucid metaphors to describe the sky and the sea.
EmpoWord is a reader and rhetoric that champions the possibilities of student writing. The textbook uses actual student writing to exemplify effective writing strategies, celebrating dedicated college writing students to encourage and instruct their successors: the students in your class. Through both creative and traditional activities, readers are encouraged to explore a variety of rhetorical situations to become more critical agents of reading, writing, speaking, and listening in all facets of their lives. Straightforward and readable instruction sections introduce key vocabulary, concepts, and strategies. Three culminating assignments (Descriptive Personal Narrative; Text-Wrestling Analysis; Persuasive Research Essay) give students a chance to show their learning while also practicing rhetorical awareness techniques for future writing situations.
As educators, it's important to create a classroom environment that empowers student voices and provides opportunities for student choice. In the ELA classroom, this can be achieved by offering students choice in what they read, write, and how they demonstrate their understanding. This professional learning activity aims to provide ELA teachers with strategies and resources to effectively provide students with choice and enhance their learning experiences.
This article assembles free resources from the Energy and the Polar Environment issue of the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears cyberzine into a unit outline based on the 5E learning cycle framework. Outlines are provided for Grades K-2 and 3-5.
English 101 is an introductory composition course, designed to improve your skills in expository and persuasive writing; the writing you will be doing in other courses in college and in many jobs. Sometimes this kind of writing is called transactional writing because it’s used to transact something—inform and (often) persuade a reasonably well-educated audience; conduct business; and evaluate, review, or explain a complex process, procedure, or event. The idea of this course is to develop your writing skills in conjunction with topics that interest you. This course focuses on the importance of reading and writing (more largely education in general) and how we can use those tools to help within our communities.
During this class, we will be investigating the basic question: “What is literature?” What does literature mean to you? How do we define literature? What is counted as literature and why? What does literature have to do with popular culture? Does literature have value in today’s society? How does literature fit into our modern lives? Is literature important anymore? Why do we need (or not need) literature? How should literature be approached in schools? How have different concepts/ideas been portrayed in literature throughout history? What is canonical literature? Why does a lot of canonical literature reflect limited points of view? The idea of this course is to develop your writing skills in conjunction with topics related to literature that interests you. This semester we will be focusing our course on the importance of reading and writing (more largely education in general) and how we can use those tools to think and write critically about the things we read.
This course is a comprehensive English Composition course, covering all of the essential content about the writing process, rhetorical styles, and writing successfully for college. Students learn about critical thinking, analysis, argumentation, reflection, and making sound rhetorical choices to write effective academic essays. Students also learn techniques for reading, interpreting, and utilizing a variety of sources in their writing. The course content covers key grammatical concepts, multimodal writing, collaboration, research skills, and proper documentation. The course design allows students a way to master concepts and skills in small bites, through engaging practice activities and frequent questioning with targeted feedback.
This course is a comprehensive English Composition Corequisite course, covering all of the essentials for writing successfully in college (in English Composition 1, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/englishcomp1/), with additional practice on key concepts. Students learn about critical thinking, reflection, reading, the writing process, analysis, argumentation, the research process, citation, and grammar.
The 11th grade learning experience consists of 7 mostly month-long units aligned to the Common Core State Standards, with available course material for teachers and students easily accessible online. Over the course of the year there is a steady progression in text complexity levels, sophistication of writing tasks, speaking and listening activities, and increased opportunities for independent and collaborative work. Rubrics and student models accompany many writing assignments.Throughout the 11th grade year, in addition to the Common Read texts that the whole class reads together, students each select an Independent Reading book and engage with peers in group Book Talks. Students move from learning the class rituals and routines and genre features of argument writing in Unit 11.1 to learning about narrative and informational genres in Unit 11.2: The American Short Story. Teacher resources provide additional materials to support each unit.
In this unit, students will take a look at the historical vision of the American Dream as put together by our Founding Fathers. They will be asked: How, if at all, has this dream changed? Is this dream your dream? First students will participate in an American Dream Convention, acting as a particular historical figure arguing for his or her vision of the American Dream, and then they will write an argument laying out and defending their personal view of what the American Dream should be.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Students read and annotate closely one of the documents that they feel expresses the American Dream.
Students participate in an American Dream Convention, acting as a particular historical figure arguing his or her vision of the American Dream.
Students write a paper, taking into consideration the different points of view in the documents read, answering the question “What is the American Dream now?”
Students write their own argument describing and defending their vision of what the American Dream should be.
GUIDING QUESTIONS
These questions are a guide to stimulate thinking, discussion, and writing on the themes and ideas in the unit. For complete and thoughtful answers and for meaningful discussions, students must use evidence based on careful reading of the texts.
What has been the historical vision of the American Dream?
What should the American Dream be? (What should we as individuals and as a nation aspire to?)
How would women, former slaves, and other disenfranchised groups living during the time these documents were written respond to them?
BENCHMARK ASSESSMENT: Cold Read
During this unit, on a day of your choosing, we recommend you administer a Cold Read to assess students’ reading comprehension. For this assessment, students read a text they have never seen before and then respond to multiple-choice and constructed-response questions. The assessment is not included in this course materials.
In this lesson, students will think about the challenges of marketing to an American teenage audience and consider the audience their character most likely tried to influence.
In this lesson, students will contribute to a conversation about what makes a good discussion and discuss with their classmates the ideas in the historical documents they have read so far.
In this short unit, students will spend three lessons exploring the importance of themes and main ideas in fiction and informational texts. Now would be a good time to have them take an assessment of their reading and writing skills. They'll explore theme through O. Henry's classic short story "The Gift of the Magi" and consider how this piece compares to the main idea in the article "The Proven Power of Giving, Not Getting."
Over the next two lessons, you will complete the culminating assessment for this unit. You'll read text and answer questions that will reflect your reading comprehension.Over the next two lessons, students will complete the culminating assessment for this unit.In this lesson, students will read text and answer questions that reflect their reading comprehension. Some questions will ask students to select from a group of answers supplied. Other questions will ask students to construct their own answers and write them in the space provided.
The 12th grade learning experience consists of 7 mostly month-long units aligned to the Common Core State Standards, with available course material for teachers and students easily accessible online. Over the course of the year there is a steady progression in text complexity levels, sophistication of writing tasks, speaking and listening activities, and increased opportunities for independent and collaborative work. Rubrics and student models accompany many writing assignments.Throughout the 12th grade year, in addition to the Common Read texts that the whole class reads together, students each select an Independent Reading book and engage with peers in group Book Talks. Language study is embedded in every 12th grade unit as students use annotation to closely review aspects of each text. Teacher resources provide additional materials to support each unit.
Who decides who among us is civilized? What rules should govern immigration into the United States? Whom should we let in? Keep out? What should we do about political refugees or children without papers? What if they would be a drain on our economy?
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Students read William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest and write a short argument about who in the play is truly civilized.
Students participate in a mock trial in which they argue for or against granting asylum to a teenage refugee, and then they write arguments in favor of granting asylum to one refugee and against granting it to another.
Students read an Independent Reading text and write an informational essay about a global issue and how that relates to their book.
GUIDING QUESTIONS
These questions are a guide to stimulate thinking, discussion, and writing on the themes and ideas in the unit. For complete and thoughtful answers and for meaningful discussions, students must use evidence based on careful reading of the texts.
What role do national identity, custom, religion, and other locally held beliefs play in a world increasingly characterized by globalization?
How does Shakespeare’s view of human rights compare with that in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Who is civilized? Who decides what civilization is or how it’s defined?
How do we behave toward and acknowledge those whose culture is different from our own?
What is globalization? In this lesson, students will explore answers to the question by reading information from a website called Globalization 101. They’ll choose one area of interest to explore from this website. Students will plan a presentation to share their findings with the whole class.
Who in Shakespeare’s play is guilty of violating human rights as we understand them today? In this lesson, students will continue reading, annotating, and discussing act 2 in small groups. They’ll also focus on Gonzalo’s ideas of an Eden-like civilization.
In this lesson, students will discuss human rights. They’ll begin asking who in The Tempest is civilized. Students will research what life was like in Shakespeare’s time. Then they’ll read and annotate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Students will consider the different ways that humor can be used by a writer to criticize people, practices, and institutions that he or she thinks are in need of serious reform. Students will read satirists ranging from classical Rome to modern day to examine how wit can be used to make important points about culture.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Students research an aspect of modern life that they would like to lampoon.
Students read from satirists across history to absorb the style and forms of humor and institutions satirized.
Students write their own satire, drawing on techniques of famous satirists to criticize their targets.
GUIDING QUESTIONS
These questions are a guide to stimulate thinking, discussion, and writing on the themes and ideas in the unit. For complete and thoughtful answers and for meaningful discussions, students must use evidence based on careful reading of the texts.
What is satire, and when is it too harsh?
How can humor and irony make you more persuasive?
What do you think is funny? How far would you go to satirize it?
Who gets more reaction—satirists or protestors?