This unit focuses on books that have characters with physical or intellectual disabilities. While reading these books, students will practice building reading stamina, finding themes, using evidence to support thinking, and making inferences.
This unit focuses on the concept of point of view. Students will investigate both the perspective from which the narrator recounts a narrative and the perspective different characters may take within a narrative. Students will also examine character change throughout a story.
This unit is being piloted this year (spring 2020). Students become deeply immersed in the fantasy genre and further develop higher-level thinking skills to study how authors develop characters and themes over time. They think metaphorically as well as analytically, explore the quests and themes within and across their novels, and consider the implications of conflicts, themes, and lessons learned.
In this unit, students read a variety of poems and learn about elements of figurative language. They will learn about rhythm, rhyme scheme, stanzas, metaphors, similes, personification, alliteration, and hyperbole.
In this unit, students will broaden their understanding of what it means to survive. In real life and in literature, people survive by being resilient in the face of challenges of many kinds. The challenges can be physical (an earthquake or tsunami), psychological (surviving a loss, overcoming bullying), or social (surviving social discrimination). Similarly, people build physical, psychological and social resilience.