A Christmas Carol

This engrossing tale relates Ebenezer Scrooge's ghostly journeys through Christmases past, present, and future and his ultimate transformation from a harsh and grasping old miser to a charitable and compassionate human being. A perennial classic that has become as much a part of the holiday season as holly, mistletoe, and evergreen wreaths.

Careful! Spoilers below:

Unit Objectives

Unit Objectives

  • Students will comprehend and analyze A Christmas Carol within the historical context of Victorian England.

  • Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts.

  • Students will draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g. sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).

  • Students will adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language (e.g. conventions, style, vocabulary) to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.

  • Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.

  • Students use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish their own purposes (e.g., for learning, enjoyment, persuasion, and the exchange of information).

Guiding Questions:

  • How do setting and characterization interact in this novella.

  • What social commentaries does Charles Dickens make in A Christmas Carol?

  • What is an allegory and how does this term apply to A Christmas Carol?

Common Core Standards

  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.7.9 Compare and contrast a fictional portrayal of a time, place, or character and a historical account of the same period as a means of understanding how authors of fiction use or alter history

  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.7.10 By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, in the grades 6–8 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.

  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.7.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text; provide an objective summary of the text.

  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.7.1c Pose questions that elicit elaboration and respond to others’ questions and comments with relevant observations and ideas that bring the discussion back on topic as needed.

  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.7.2b Develop the topic with relevant facts, definitions, concrete details, quotations, or other information and examples.