Unit Overview: Read more about the unit and find all unit materials here on the Fishtank website

Students explore the power of oral storytelling in African-American and Hispanic cultures through reading and listening to a wide variety of folktales and stories that have been passed down within families and communities for generations. These stories serve as a launching point for students to explore and understand the world around them, to grapple with what it means to be a good person, and to consider what they can learn from the experiences of others. This unit, in connection with others in the course, will challenge students to think about the power of storytelling and the influence it can have on individuals and entire communities.

This unit focuses on helping readers see the connection between recounting stories, determining a central message, and using details to explain how the central message is conveyed. Through multiple readings of the same stories, students will be able to analyze and discover how messages are developed. Rereading the same folktale multiple times also supports students' fluency and vocabulary development. 

Students continue to work on sharing their ideas through discourse, focusing on how to provide evidence and examples to justify a particular idea or point. Being able to clearly articulate and support their own ideas sets students up for success in later units when they begin to build on to and critique the ideas of their classmates. 

Students continue to build their writing fluency by writing daily in response to the text. In this unit students learn how to brainstorm and write literary analysis/opinion paragraphs, focusing on how to write topic sentences that state an opinion and then how to determine evidence and reasons that support the opinion. The unit concludes with students writing their own folktales or stories, using the core texts and strategies learned in previous units as a guide.