Poetry gives writers the opportunity to express the highs and lows of their emotions and their personal experiences. Readers of poetry gain insight into how others feel and think about some of the deepest experiences in life, the experiences of love and loss.

This Grade 7 unit emphasizes the study of poetry and encourages students to consider the essential question What do we learn from love and loss?

The unit offers a wide variety of literature for students to explore this question, including both contemporary and classic works. The selections include poems about family relationships, by Pat Mora, Aracelis Girmay, and Wing Tek Lum, as well as the timeless love poem “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe and the classic narrative poem, “The Highwayman.”

Students will have a choice between:

• A 5 Paragraph essay to the prompt: How has Scrooge changed over the course of the novel? What character traits did he pose at the beginning of the novel vs. at the end?

OR

• A Character analysis project for one of the characters in the novel. 

  • Students will have to analyze one character on their strengths, weaknesses, vices, battles, and other traits from the novel using CERs to identify their trait (C), give evidence from the book (direct quotes- E), and explain how that evidence correlates to their answer (R). 

Students will have a Studysync Final. This is a DCSD required test to prep students for the iReady and CMAS test. The skills they are tested on are skills that we dive into throughout the unit. Many skills for this test focus on figurative language, parts of speech, and analyzing what the text means literally and figuratively (emotionally).