This unit addresses four 6th grade reading standards taught throughout the course of a trimester. These lessons are designed to be taught one day a week, while the other days in the trimester are focused on writing units. This unit is designed to be co-taught with a general education and special education teacher, but can be easily adapted if only one teacher is present.

This resource contains activities to help students draw conclusions/make inferences. Such activities include: guess the emotion, you are what you bring, using pictures, and links to additional resources.

There is no one poem that represents the experience of African Americans in the United States, yet the history of racism in this country is seared deeply into the lives of many African Americans. “The Weakness” by Toi Derricotte recounts an experience with racism through the eyes of a young, light-skinned African American girl going shopping with her grandmother in a department store in 1945. The poems in The African American Experience offer a number of perspectives from African American poets that add a rich complexity to students’ perceptions of African American lives.

Four Questions Protocol is a good strategy for students to use when reading the material.

Three Column Notes is a great resource to use as students read and pace themselves through reading material.

Three Column Notes is a great resource to use as students read and pace themselves through reading material.

Three Column Notes is a great resource to use as students read and pace themselves through reading material.

Three Column Notes is a great resource to use as students read and pace themselves through reading material.

To scaffold, AVID offers 2 and 3 column notes for different grades. See link at the bottom of the document.

Three Column Notes is a great resource to use as students read and pace themselves through reading material.

To scaffold, AVID offers 2 and 3 column notes for different grades. See link at the bottom of the document.

Three Column Notes is a great resource to use as students read and pace themselves through reading material.

In this lesson, students explore literature and try to describe the ways humor plays a role. Students consider the rhetorical devices involved in creating humor before searching for them in texts.

A teachers guide for Betsey Brown by Ntozake Shange, including chapter-specific questions for increased comprehension, questions for class discussion, and suggestions for further study.

Students describe environmental and herditary factors that increase the chance of developing cancer.

This resource includes lessons to accompany a reading of The Crucible. Students will spend time reading closely in order to make interpretations pertaining to character development throughout the play.

In this lesson, students work cooperatively to analyze the title characters of Romeo and Juliet. Students look for citations that help develop their characters, then write character analyses.

This lesson aligns with the 7th grade Social Studies curriculum and works best when integrated into an interdisciplinary unit, such as Reliving the Middle Ages Across Lliterary Genres. Interdisciplinary Units are effective when teachers from two different content areas collaborate to plan lessons, assessments, activities and projects that support their content skills and standards. The content being taught in one course supports the content in another and students approach difficult, content-specific texts with more familiarity and gain better comprehension.  Students read two nonfiction articles about the Middle Ages, which lasted from about A.D. 500 to A.D. 1500. Both texts examine one of the most significant events of this time period-- the spread of the bubonic plague, or the Black Death. Each text is organized into cause-and-effect pattern of organization. One outlines HOW the disease spread (causes) and the other explains how it affected Europe (effects). Students analyze two texts by different authors writing about the same topic, the Black Plague, and compare/contrast how each author shapes their presentations of key information by emphasizing different evidence. 

For students to show understanding of character development and theme after reading The Crucible, have them create a one-pager.  This has students pulling text, applying it using Bloom's Taxonomy, and creating a visual.

The following unit incorporates multimedia and classroom activities to encourage students to explore and interact with poetry by first writing letters to important historical poets as practice for writing letters to the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors, a group that represents poetry in America at its best.

Students will read the story, Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold and compare thier own lives with that of a girl in a tenement builidng in New York City. Through reading the story, students will better understand the hopes and dreams of the less fortunate.

Student will predict ideas or events that may take place in the text, give rationale for predictions, confirm and discuss predictions as the story progresses.

In this lesson, the students will get practice in reading and writing habits that they have been working with throughout the curriculum, in this case using poetry.