What We're Learning This Quarter in ELA? 🤔

📚 Module 1: The Middle Ages

Essential Question: How does society influence a person’s future?

In Module 1, students explore life in medieval Europe and examine how social class, family background, education, occupation, and opportunity shaped a person’s life and future. Through Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, Castle Diary, and The Midwife’s Apprentice, students explore the experiences of young people from different social positions and consider how society can both limit and influence individual choices and opportunities.

Students will practice:

• Analyzing characters and their perspectives

• Identifying and developing themes

• Examining how setting influences characters and events

• Using text evidence to support ideas

• Understanding how social status affects education, work, health, and opportunity

• Writing first-person narratives from a character’s perspective

• Using dialogue, description, pacing, internal dialogue, and transitions to strengthen narrative writing

📖 The Three Main Texts

Arc A – Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!
Students examine the lives of children from different social classes in a medieval manor, focusing on character, perspective, social status, and how adults and society influence young people.

Arc B – Castle Diary
Students follow Tobias Burgess, a young nobleman living in a 13th-century English castle, and explore education, social class, health, daily life, and what Tobias learns about his society.

Arc C – The Midwife’s Apprentice
Students examine Alyce’s journey as she develops skills, identity, confidence, and agency while navigating the expectations and limitations of medieval society.

✍🏽 Big Writing Focus

The module's writing type is Narrative. By the end, students write an original first-person narrative from the perspective of an adolescent in medieval Europe who encounters someone from a different social class.