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

In this unit, students read the core texts The Hundred Dresses and Garvey’s Choice as a way of exploring what it means to be accepting and tolerant of themselves and others. The Hundred Dresses challenges students to think about the different roles associated with bullying through the eyes of the narrator, who struggles with her own involvement with a classmate who is bullied. Garvey’s Choice illustrates the way others influence the way we see ourselves, both positively and negatively, and the power of accepting ourselves by tracing Garvey’s path to self-discovery and acceptance. Both texts are full of moments and messages that are easily relatable for students at this grade level. Therefore, it is our hope that the experiences of the characters in both texts will serve as a neutral launching point for deeper discussions about bullying, tolerance, acceptance, and forgiveness. 

The main focus of the unit is on identifying and tracing the central message across a longer text. Students will develop a deep understanding of each character’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations, which will help them identify and explain how the central message is developed and conveyed through the characters in each text. Students will also begin to understand how successive parts of a text build on each other to push the plot forward. Particularly with Garvey’s Choice, students will analyze the genre features of novels written in verse and how each part helps build and develop the central message. 

When discussing the text, students continue to work on engaging with the thinking of others by building on, and paraphrasing, questioning, and clarifying ideas to understand. At this point in the sequence, students should be able to write fluently in response to the daily Target Tasks to show understanding of the text. In this unit students return to working on writing strong literary analysis and opinion paragraphs, building on work done in previous units on topic sentences, supporting details, and strategies for elaboration. Students also have an opportunity to write a continuation of The Hundred Dresses, reinforcing the narrative writing work done in previous units.