About the Course

English 1 utilizes the SpringBoard Curriculum provided by the district to teach students the skills and knowledge that matter most to meet AP and college and career readiness standards. The curriculum is composed of the following 4 units

Unit 1  focuses students' attention on the telling details in the short stories they read. These details unlock clues to meaning, purpose, and author's craft that students can use to write insightful literary analyses. The collection of short stories in Unit 1 provides a wide range of literary elements and writing styles for students to analyze and then emulate in their own original short stories.

Unit 2 Students will explore how poets express deep meaning using only a few words, and how performance choices affect a text's meaning. Over the course of the unit, students will have the chance to write literary analysis essays and original poems

Unit 3 focuses on compelling evidence in both informational and argumentative texts. Through reading and analyzing personal essays, news articles, and opinion pieces, students explore the ways in which authors use anecdotes, facts, and data to develop their theses and support their claims. Students finish out the unit by working through the research process and creating a presentation about a career that interests them.

Unit 4 Unit 4 focuses on novels—how authors build worlds for their characters to inhabit and draw their readers into those worlds. By examining the opening lines and paragraphs of several novels, students see how authors set the scene and get their readers to keep reading. Students then transition to studying the literary elements and themes of one novel, If You Come Softly.