Students will learn nonfiction research skills as they delve into the history of World War II. Public speaking skills will be put to use as they present their information to the class so everyone has the background knowledge necessary to enjoy our first novel of the year, The Darkest Hour by Caroline Tung-Richmond.  As we read, we will notice how authors use and alter history to create historical fiction texts, and we will explore some fascinating real-life people and situations that are reflected in the pages of this action-packed novel.

This unit will culminate with students reading and researching their own historical fiction novels and using the skills we worked on as a class to analyze their own novel.

This unit will be broken into two chunks, split up by Christmas break.  First, students will read the novel and explore themes in literature and how authors create and develop themes.  We will also discuss how authors create mood, why authors use alliteration, and explore the use of Latin and Greek affixes in modern English. (Spoiler alert: a LOT of English words are based on Greek or Latin!)

In the second half of the unit, students will learn how film makers create mood in films, and then compare those techniques with how authors create mood. Class analysis and discussion about word choice, sentence structures, punctuation will lead us to see how camera angles, sound effects, and background music create moods.  We will finish the unit by creating our own short films! We like to invite the community in for our 7th Grade Film Festival where we showcase our efforts!

This is our nonfiction unit! We start off by researching Women's History Month (how it began, why it matters), and then each student selects an influential (and mostly unknown) female to research and write about.  A second research project follows the first, and students get to choose another person that represents another cultural heritage month. (Sometimes we have enough time for round three, which involves a local history research component!)

In this unit, students explore the power that writers have as they experience selecting information and how to convey it to their readers.  Students will learn how to analyze the tone of informational texts and be able to recognize reliable sources and objective texts.  This is a reading and writing heavy unit that culminates in the BRIJHS History Museum, a night when the community joins us to explore all of the fascinating history that our 7th grade investigators have unearthed.

The year will be finished off by reading portions of the novel The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle by Janet Fox.  A complex read full of twists and turns, changing time periods and perspectives, and creepy, crawly spooks, this novel allows us time to explore how a poem or story's structure impacts its message and meaning.

Students will explore different types of figurative language and sentence structures, and we will analyze how the structures of the text and additional poems change how the reader understands the theme or imagines the scene.  This unit will end with a poetry slam and an art gallery to showcase their new knowledge of symbolism, poetry, and structure.  Again, the community is invited to attend!

*Alternately, we will read one of my all-time favorite novels, The Westing Game, which is also a complex story written from a third person omniscient point of view. The rest of the unit will remain the same :)