After reading the anchor text, The Hate U Give, students will make connections to additional sources, gather evidence from the sources, reflect, questions, and engage in a leaderless discussion.

Using historical texts, information texts, and historical fiction, this module explores the migration experiences in America. It is designed to be flexible. It can be combined with information on Critical Race Theory from Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education by Sensoy and DiAngelo for the upper grades or for “Critical Texts in Literacy: Living Inquiries into Racial Justice and Immigration” by Riley and Crawford-Garrett (NCTE) for the middle school grades. The teacher can choose any or all of the text sets. There are a number of possibilities for optional literature circles with suggested full-length texts. Each text set includes pre-reading, during reading, and post-reading strategies.

Using published writers' texts and students' own writing, this unit explores emotions that are associated with the artful and deliberate use of commas, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points (end-stop marks of punctuation).

Students use persuasive writing and an understanding of the characteristics of letters to the editor to compose effective letters to the editor on topics of interest to them.

In the first bend of this unit, students will closely read multiple perspectives on the “American Dream” in
order to collect information to use and integrate that information into an evidence-based perspective.
Students will examine primary and secondary source documents to make informed decisions about
what information to collect that may inspire their writing about “The American Dream.”

In the second bend of this unit, students will engage in a short-research process to create a draft of
argumentative speech on the “American Dream” with a specific purpose, audience, and tone in mind.
They will use their inquiry research questions from bend one to begin analyzing search results and citing
and gathering relevant, accurate, and credible information.

Real-world writing allows students and teachers to connect the dots between writing in the classroom by classifying writing into six areas: Express and Reflect; Inform and Explain; Evaluate and Judge; Inquire and Explore; Analyze and Interpret; Take a Stand/Propose a Solution.

Students will paraphrase and summarize a key scene from Romeo & Juliet in writing, working both in groups and individually.

This is a sample Unit Plan for Grade 9 English Language Arts that I wrote for my English Methods class.

This chapter introduces students to the basics of reading literature. It introduces students to subjective and objective reading, and goes over the basic ideas behind reading for plot, character, setting, and theme. Learning objectives are: Ask subjective and objective questions about what they have read; Learn the meanings of “tone,” “diction,” and “syntax.”; Identify the major elements of a plot; Identify character, setting, and theme; Differentiate between internal and external conflict.

Students will complete a series of tasks to build skills in preparation of writing a descritpive/narrative essay.