In this lesson, students will begin to learn about the American short story. They will have an opportunity to practice close reading, and they'll explore the qualities of the short story genre through Quick Writes and discussion.
Getting Started
Type of Unit: Introduction
Prior Knowledge
Students should be able to:
Understand ratio concepts and use ratios.
Use ratio and rate reasoning to solve real-world problems.
Identify and use the multiplication property of equality.
Lesson Flow
This unit introduces students to the routines that build a successful classroom math community, and it introduces the basic features of the digital course that students will use throughout the year.
An introductory card sort activity matches students with their partner for the week. Then over the course of the week, students learn about the routines of Opening, Work Time, Ways of Thinking, Apply the Learning (some lessons), Summary of the Math, Reflection, and Exercises. Students learn how to present their work to the class, the importance of students’ taking responsibility for their own learning, and how to effectively participate in the classroom math community.
Students then work on Gallery problems, to further explore the resources and tools and to learn how to organize their work.
The mathematical work of the unit focuses on ratios and rates, including card sort activities in which students identify equivalent ratios and match different representations of an equivalent ratio. Students use the multiplication property of equality to justify solutions to real-world ratio problems.
Proportional Relationships
Type of Unit: Concept
Prior Knowledge
Students should be able to:
Understand what a rate and ratio are.
Make a ratio table.
Make a graph using values from a ratio table.
Lesson Flow
Students start the unit by predicting what will happen in certain situations. They intuitively discover they can predict the situations that are proportional and might have a hard time predicting the ones that are not. In Lessons 2–4, students use the same three situations to explore proportional relationships. Two of the relationships are proportional and one is not. They look at these situations in tables, equations, and graphs. After Lesson 4, students realize a proportional relationship is represented on a graph as a straight line that passes through the origin. In Lesson 5, they look at straight lines that do not represent a proportional relationship. Lesson 6 focuses on the idea of how a proportion that they solved in sixth grade relates to a proportional relationship. They follow that by looking at rates expressed as fractions, finding the unit rate (the constant of proportionality), and then using the constant of proportionality to solve a problem. In Lesson 8, students fine-tune their definition of proportional relationship by looking at situations and determining if they represent proportional relationships and justifying their reasoning. They then apply what they have learned to a situation about flags and stars and extend that thinking to comparing two prices—examining the equations and the graphs. The Putting It Together lesson has them solve two problems and then critique other student work.
Gallery 1 provides students with additional proportional relationship problems.
The second part of the unit works with percents. First, percents are tied to proportional relationships, and then students examine percent situations as formulas, graphs, and tables. They then move to a new context—salary increase—and see the similarities with sales taxes. Next, students explore percent decrease, and then they analyze inaccurate statements involving percents, explaining why the statements are incorrect. Students end this sequence of lessons with a formative assessment that focuses on percent increase and percent decrease and ties it to decimals.
Students have ample opportunities to check, deepen, and apply their understanding of proportional relationships, including percents, with the selection of problems in Gallery 2.
In this unit, students will take a look at the historical vision of the American Dream as put together by our Founding Fathers. They will be asked: How, if at all, has this dream changed? Is this dream your dream? First students will participate in an American Dream Convention, acting as a particular historical figure arguing for his or her vision of the American Dream, and then they will write an argument laying out and defending their personal view of what the American Dream should be.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Students read and annotate closely one of the documents that they feel expresses the American Dream.
Students participate in an American Dream Convention, acting as a particular historical figure arguing his or her vision of the American Dream.
Students write a paper, taking into consideration the different points of view in the documents read, answering the question “What is the American Dream now?”
Students write their own argument describing and defending their vision of what the American Dream should be.
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 has been the historical vision of the American Dream?
What should the American Dream be? (What should we as individuals and as a nation aspire to?)
How would women, former slaves, and other disenfranchised groups living during the time these documents were written respond to them?
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.
Students will read and analyze a short story from the Southern Gothic genre entitled "The Life you Save May be Your Own" by Flannery O'Conner. They will continue to explore the ideas of human compassion and morality by examining the apparent lack of compassion in the characters of Mr. Shiftlet and the old woman, Lucynell Crater. Students will use close reading strategies to identify examples of indirect characterization that contribute to their analysis of these two central characters in the text. Image source: "Mockingbird" by skeeze on Pixabay.com.
"Homeless," by Anna Quindlen, allows the student to understand homelessness as it affects many people on a broader scale. She emphasizes the individuality of homelessness, the fact that they not only lack possessions but have no place to keep them."The First" (also titled "Eviction") is a short poem by Lucille Clifton that provides the opportunity to compare and contrast the approach to the same issue through another genre.In "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls the parents choose to live as homeless students. Students will compare and contrast the Walls' view of homelessness with Quindlen's and Clifton's.Final Assessment: How do Anna Quindlen and Lucille Clifton use language to convince the reader that their arguments have value? (focus on use of specific language, word choice, mood, tone, etc.) Would Walls agree?
Four full-year digital course, built from the ground up and fully-aligned to the Common Core State Standards, for 7th grade Mathematics. Created using research-based approaches to teaching and learning, the Open Access Common Core Course for Mathematics is designed with student-centered learning in mind, including activities for students to develop valuable 21st century skills and academic mindset.
This is opening and closing of the term materials for Introduction to Poetry.
Learning objectives/topics/skills:
*Students contribute to the course reading list, making their interests / values / perspectives central to the
content and work of the class.
*Students gain confidence in their ability to read poetry, and end the term wanting to read more.
*Students learn from a variety of perspectives other than my own.
*Students reflect on their learning throughout the course, specifically the way their own relationship with /
thinking about the poetry that matters to them may have developed or changed.
In this lesson, students analyze primary source documents in an effort to answer the central historical question: Was JFK a strong supporter of Civil Rights? First, the teacher streams a video clip from Discovery Education on JFK and civil rights. Students form a hypothesis and discuss whether JFK was ‘strongŰŞ on civil rights based on this. Students then read a 1963 JFK speech supporting the Civil Rights Act; as a class, they answer sourcing, close reading and context questions and revisit their hypothesis. Students then read John LewisŰŞs controversial original draft of the speech he delivered at the March on Washington. They answer guiding questions which corroborate both documents and attempt to reach a conclusion. If there is time, the teacher may bookend the lesson with another clip which shows how LBJ signed the eventual law into action.
In this lesson students will create a graphic organizer that uses the titles and subtitles of an informational text before they begin reading.
This informational text explores how the Inupiat of Alaska's northwest have adapted to changing climate conditions throughout the past and present. The changes impact how close to the ocean they live and how easily they can hunt bowhead whales to maintain their lifestyle. The text is written at a grade two through grade three reading level. This is a PDF containing the informational text.
In this lesson, students analyze a primary source in an effort to answer the central historical question: How did Americans react to ShaysŰŞ Rebellion? Students read a textbook excerpt (included) about ShaysŰŞ Rebellion and a letter from Thomas Jefferson speaking about ShaysŰŞ rebels. Students answer questions that ask them to analyze the letter through sourcing, contextualization, close reading, and corroboration questions. A final class discussion corroborates the textbook passage and the Jefferson letter in an effort to challenge the popular account in which all Americans feared the rebellion.
This paper addresses the implications, for ELLs, of the new standard's requirement that students be able to read and understand complex, informationally dense texts. The authors discuss the types of supports that learners need in order to work with complex texts. They also provide a sample of what academic discourse involves, using an excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail. They demonstrate how English learners can be provided with strategies for accessing complex texts, such as closely examining one sentence at a time. The authors argue that instruction must go beyond vocabulary and should begin with an examination of our beliefs about language, literacy and learning.
This informational text explores how the Inupiat of Alaska's northwest have adapted to changing climate conditions throughout the past and present. The changes impact how close to the ocean they live and how easily they can hunt bowhead whales to maintain their lifestyle. The text is written at a grade two through grade three reading level. This version is a full-color PDF that can be printed, cut and folded to form a book. Each book contains color photographs and illustrations.
In this lesson, students analyze primary source documents in an effort to answer the central historical question: Who was a stronger advocate for African-Americans, Booker T. Washington or W.E.B. DuBois? The teacher first uses a mini-lecture and a streaming video clip from Discovery Education to explain late 19th-century race relations in the South. Students then analyze an excerpt from WashingtonŰŞs ‘Atlanta CompromiseŰŞ speech as the teacher modelsŰÓextensivelyŰÓsourcing, contextualization, corroboration, and close reading techniques, answering questions on a graphic organizer. Students then do the same, on their own, with a selection from DuBoisŰŞ Souls of Black Folk. A final class discussion evaluates the 2 men: who was more right in his approach, given the historical context?
This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. Four broad themes are closely examined: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction.
This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to use geometric properties to solve problems. In particular, it will help you identify and help students who have difficulty: decomposing complex shapes into simpler ones in order to solve a problem; bringing together several geometric concepts to solve a problem; and finding the relationship between radii of inscribed and circumscribed circles of right triangles.
This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to: work with concepts of congruency and similarity, including identifying corresponding sides and corresponding angles within and between triangles; Identify and understand the significance of a counter-example; Prove, and evaluate proofs in a geometric context.
This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to produce and evaluate geometrical proofs. In particular, this unit is intended to help you identify and assist students who have difficulties in: interpreting diagrams; identifying mathematical knowledge relevant to an argument; linking visual and algebraic representations; and producing and evaluating mathematical arguments.
This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to: recognize the differences between equations and identities; substitute numbers into algebraic statements in order to test their validity in special cases; resist common errors when manipulating expressions such as 2(x Đ 3) = 2x Đ 3; (x + 3)_ = x_ + 3_; and carry out correct algebraic manipulations. It also aims to encourage discussion on some common misconceptions about algebra.