Reading. We will introduce a collection of age-appropriate, high-interest short stories, reading excerpts, and poems. Students will learn to slow down the reading process to practice close-reading strategies and reading with a pencil in hand.
Here are our semester reading goals:
Rekindle the joy of reading through captivating and thought-provoking stories, excerpts, and poems. Each reading will include a suspense-driven plot, multi-dimensional characters, complex point of view, or universal themes to prompt students to think and respond analytically.
Develop confidence in the comprehension of reading passages with higher-level vocabulary, multiple meaning words, and complex sentence structures or complex thought.
Identify shifts in plot, point of view, tone, mood, and narrative technique and determine the effect.
Build skills in critical thinking to identify implied meanings, make inferences, and think interpretatively about key words, sentences, and paragraphs.
Practice questioning and thinking skills needed for digging under the surface of the text rather than just reading for entertainment.
Participate in thoughtful and challenging discussions about the readings’ conflicts, characterization, and themes to articulate and draft multiple-sentence commentaries.
Compare and contrast characters or speakers’ physicality, personality, motivation, language, and actions to see the impact on the plot, the message, other characters, or setting.
Compare and contrast multiple settings and the way each author portrays the landscape, weather, architecture, and background characters to enhance the mood, conflict, and themes.
Analyze the narrative text features (word choice, sentence syntax, imagery, language, details) and narrative elements (foreshadow, symbolism, flashback, fragmentation, irony, shift) used to effectively impact underlying messages, build specific character feelings and qualities, the overall tone and point-of-view, and successfully impact the reader.
Build the practice of strong annotating in the text margins.
Find the most relevant and useful text evidence that can be used to build short-answer responses or a 5-paragraph essay.
Writing. We will present specific literary analysis questions for each reading, and students will write either a short-answer response or 5-paragraph essay based on these questions. We will give students a method of brainstorming, organizing their ideas, and developing their ideas so they can come up with a solid thesis statement and three body-paragraph claims that answer the question fully and accurately. We will structure each paragraph the same every time so that students can build confidence in organizing their short-answer responses or essays even before beginning to write.
Here are our writing goals:
Use the writing process to complete literary analysis paragraphs and essays in a highly structured and clearly defined system of repeatable steps for brainstorming, organizing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing final writing.
Hunt for significant details for each of the main narrative elements (setting, character, plot, point of view, theme) and build the good practice of categorizing and organizing those details into thoroughly outlined notes that will be accessible for use during drafting.
Work through the introduction, body paragraphs, and concluding paragraph of a literary analysis essay.
Practice thesis statements and topic sentences to explicitly and clearly state claims that show depth of thought and answer the given literary analysis prompts with specificity and strong logic.
Combine specific and concrete details from the text into concise sentences for building context and background for literary analysis statements.
Provide enough context to tell the reader what was happening before the quote occurred, while at the same time, not going overboard with too much summation.
Interweave personal commentary with quotes to create quote sandwiches of “my words + author’s words + my words.”