The 11th grade learning experience consists of 7 mostly month-long units aligned to the Common Core State Standards, with available course material for teachers and students easily accessible online. Over the course of the year there is a steady progression in text complexity levels, sophistication of writing tasks, speaking and listening activities, and increased opportunities for independent and collaborative work. Rubrics and student models accompany many writing assignments.Throughout the 11th grade year, in addition to the Common Read texts that the whole class reads together, students each select an Independent Reading book and engage with peers in group Book Talks. Students move from learning the class rituals and routines and genre features of argument writing in Unit 11.1 to learning about narrative and informational genres in Unit 11.2: The American Short Story. Teacher resources provide additional materials to support each unit.

This unit uses William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing as a vehicle to help students consider how a person is powerless in the face of rumor and how reputations can alter lives, both for good and for ill. They will consider comedy and what makes us laugh. They will see how the standards of beauty and societal views toward women have changed since the Elizabethan Age and reflect on reasons for those changes. As students consider the play, they will write on the passages that inspire and plague them and on topics relating to one of the themes in the play. Finally, they will bring Shakespeare’s words to life in individual performances and in group scene presentations.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Students read Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing .
Students read two Shakespearean sonnets and excerpts from an Elizabethan morality handbook dealing with types of women, and they respond to them from several different perspectives.
For each work of literature, students do some writing. They learn to write a sonnet; create a Prompt Book; complete a Dialectical Journal; and write an analytical essay about a topic relating to a theme in the play.
Students see Shakespeare’s play as it was intended to be seen: in a performance. They memorize 15 or more lines from the play and perform them for the class. Students take part in a short scene as either a director or an actor.

GUIDING QUESTIONS

These questions are a guide to stimulate thinking, discussion, and writing on the themes and ideas in the unit. For complete and thoughtful answers and for meaningful discussions, students must use evidence based on careful reading of the texts.

What are society’s expectations with regard to gender roles?
Does humor transcend time? Do we share the same sense of humor as our ancestors?
How do we judge people?
How important is reputation?

BENCHMARK ASSESSMENT (Cold Read)

During this unit, on a day of your choosing, we recommend you administer a Cold Read to assess students’ reading comprehension. For this assessment, students read a text they have never seen before and then respond to multiple-choice and constructed-response questions. The assessment is not included in this course materials.

CLASSROOM FILMS

The Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing is available on DVD through Netflix and for streaming through Amazon. Other versions are also available on both sites.

In this lesson, students will see the Prompt Books as finished performances and reflect on what they’ve learned from Shakespeare during this unit.

In this lesson, students will continue to see what actually goes into a performance as they prepare to stage their Prompt Book scene.

This resource includes a lesson that requires students to read a short memoir prior to writing a memoir for a family member. Students are tasked with interviewing the family member prior to formulating their memoir, which may take the forms of photographic collages, image panels, a painting, a video, musical composition, sculpture or any other creative method. This lesson was designed to accompany the PBS documentary, The Mystery of Love. Links are provided to the PBS website for the documentary.

This resource provides a lesson and accompanying activities that provide students with an opportunity to better understand the differences between Nathaniel Hawthorne's lived experiences and those he chose to write about. Students will use information obtained from The Scarlet Letter to help them begin their investigation. Afterwards, students will research Hawthorne's contemporaries to investigate further into what influences may be evidenced in his writings.

Students read a biography and then write an essay based on what they have learned.

Students will study a variety of historical figures and specifically focus on one person to understand more about his/her life.

Either during or after the reading of Out of the Dust or another book that takes during the Dust Bowl, students will play the PBS Dust Bowl interactive activity. During the activity, students will pretend they are living in the states affected by the Dust Bowl. They will get to choose where they live and make decisions like whether or not to expand their farms or even move to California. After they find the results from their game, they will read other accounts of real people during the Dust Bowl. Then, using the results from the interactive activity, they will create their own Dust Bowl story, writing in first person and using correct historical details.

In this lesson, students gain background information on the author of Lord of the Flies, William Golding. Students complete a webquest that has them research on the William Golding home page to learn about the novelist before they read.

In this resource, students will understand how to interpret long, complex texts by reading Nicolas Guillen’s biography. Additionally, students will learn that Nicolas Guillen was a Cuban poet of social protest and a leader of the Afro-Cuban movement in the late 1920s and ’30s. His commitment to social justice and membership in the Communist Party made him the national poet of revolutionary Cuba.

After students have read Out of the Dust, they will create a Glogster. They will write about the theme, use their vocabulary words in writing, write using similes, metaphors, and personification in poetry, compare and contrast Billie Jo's experience to someone else in history, and be able to pick an option from a list. They will use their creativity to make their poster appealing to the reader.

This activity is an online scavenger hunt that will give students background information on William Shakespeare. Students search through several provided websites trying to find biographical background information on The Bard as an introduction to his life, times, and story.

In this activity, you and your students will explore Elizabethan stage practices as the rustic yet enthusiastic amateur actors from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. While it's not necessary to teach Shakespeare's biography while studying his plays, sometimes opportunities to explore his world through his own eyes present themselves in his text. Students' new insights into the text will provide them with a deeper appreciation for Shakespeare’s world. This activity will take one or two class periods.

In this lesson, students learn background information on Alice Walker, author of THe Color Purple. Students take notes from a powerpoint presentation before creating poetry pictures using collage materials or their own drawings to depict what they see in Walker's poetry.

Students trace Joan of Arc's history from childhood, through her death, and on to her nullification trial. Reading the words of laborers, pages, knights and clerics, students gain authentic historical context for a charismatic and complicated figure and better understand Joan's place in the history of the Hundred Years' War.