First things first….after looking at the file for ten minutes and sorting through some things I still don’t remember teaching this course so much. I remember some of the essays and doing Death of a Salesman….but I thought those were a different class. That being said, the organization of this unit may be a little loose.This is an SDC English 11 class that I taught for one year. By SDC this refers to a "Special Day Class" or a self-contained class. The pace is a little slower, and the content does not delve as deep as the regular education English class, but it goes through the standards pretty well.
The SDC classes in California are designed to work with students who are not at the level to be in a regular education class, with support (a.k.a. Resource Students), but students who are not low enough to work on basic skills. These Special Day Class (SDC) students are in the middle of this spectrum; they can master many of the academic standards, but need more time and more support. Where I have taught, the focus is on teaching the content that all the other students are learning, but to do it on a slower pace, and reduced standards; focusing more on key standards. Although I have a Special Education credential and only had to pass the CSET (California Subject Examinations for Teachers) Mulitple Subjects test. In order to be "highly qualified" to teach English or Social Sciences according to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), I had to take the CSET for English and Social Sciences. I passed the English and Social Sciences tests, (but not the science). Therefore I feel that my level of knowledge of the curriculum in those areas is adequate, and improving.
MAIN CONTENT
Planning Files:
I have various files, but the one file in this folder, that is not in a folder (“Second Semester Plan….”) is the most complete day by day plan for the whole class. It has all the units and what we did every day in terms of vocab, clips, warm-ups, etc.
The other folders contain either variations of that plan (“My 11th Grade ELA…” folder), or other plans from other teachers.
Hopefully this can help you on the day to day in how to put all of this stuff together.
UNITS 1-3:
1. “The Untold Story” unit has a lot of materials. One thing though is that it is largely based off of the reader that we had in Los Angeles at that time. So, that could make it a little wonky, but a lot of the stories, ideas, activities, graphic organizers, differentiated rubrics,and themes could easily be worked with.
2. The “Rhetoric of War” unit is super light. I don’t know why. Maybe it is because I have those two random essays, and the grammar, and am going at a slower pace. But there are a few files in there.
3. “Virtual Selves”. Similar size as previous unit.
Grammar: This was some of the extra content that I did to help the students out. It can be found under the “MISC” section and it has a lot of day by day plans and assessments also.
Essays:
-The “First Essay” has a cool Graphic Organizer
- The “3rd essay”….looks like it might fit into the "Virtual Selves" unit.
Novels:
Death of a Salesman:
- This was a unit that was done by my “apprentice teacher” when I was in the Master Teacher program. It was based off things that I had done with previous novels, and we also went through many iterations of the plans beforehand and during in order to try to get a well-balanced novel situation going on.
- Lesson plans. There are two versions because I taught the class two times. I looked them over and they are similar, the 5 individual docs and the folder with 6 docs.
- This one looks a little disorganized, but I hope that you can get some good ideas from it. Bottom line, the “Unit Plan” has a lot of good ideas like vocab, popcorn, 4 corners, etc. So hopefully it will helps
Great Gatsby:
This looks to be a pretty complete folder. I have a lot of background powerpoints and videos and anticipation guides. Also I have ‘character analysis’ work, study guides, a lot of quizzes, etc. It seems like I really put a lot of work into making this happen.
MISC. Stuff
1. Syllabus - it is in here
2. Summative Assessments: These are the once are the big tests that we did that were created by the departments and all English teachers in the grade had to administer them. Since my curriculum was little modified, you can find some remixes to the assessments in these files also.
3. And a few other things are in here.
Other teachers' work:
1) “11th grade lesson plans - daily” are very detailed and given to me by another teacher in my PLC. I looked through to see if there were any names or anything and didn’t see any, but they are definitely on point. From looking at them I don’t think that I followed them that closely, but I have my own day by semester plan that has all mine, so you could check it out son
2) Pacing Plans….I didn’t do these. We followed the units on the syllabus, not this American Literature action
3) There are folders (units) from units that we didn’t cover in LA, but a lot of standards are based on (i.e. The Crucible). So….I didn’t use them, but teachers graciously hooked me up and hopefully they can be useful….and it’s like opening up some Minecraft action; you click a folder and it will take you to a ton of goodies. I tried to organize them to a great extent, but they could surely be more organized.