Narratives...and more!

We have finally moved into a new area of reading study...narratives! This is partly as preparation for our CASI assessments in late April (CASI's are board wide reading comprehension assessment tools performed three times through out the year...the proceeding two were non-fiction, this time it will be fiction). Partly, it is also so we can deepen our discussion (started in our Romeo & Juliet study) about fiction texts.

Our focus will be on:

-explaining the characteristics of narratives and providing specific examples (of character, setting and plot).

-explaining the traits of characters (through stated and implied information) and connecting those traits to evidence in the text

-summarizing important ideas (key events of a plot, using strategies like first/next/then, who/wants/but/so or beginning/middle/end)

-determining the main idea/theme of a text, citing evidence from the text to support your opinion

We have already done quite a bit of work on SUMMARIZING...and CITING EVIDENCE FROM THE TEXT TO SUPPORT YOUR OPINION. These were key components of our last two major writing assignments....in both our video game and movie/play reviews.

In our writing assignments, I have hammered home the concept of SPECIFIC DETAILS OR EXAMPLES.  I'm hoping, by the end of this year, that I will have ingrained in student memory the high importance of being SPECIFIC, of grounding your writing responses, to whatever it may be--wether a text, movie, game, whatever--in the CONCRETE DETAILS provided there in. The more specific you are, the stronger your point/opinion/answer.  Being specific = clarity. Clarity = good communication.

Good communication is fundamentally what literacy study is all about. Understanding what others have written and in turn writing to be understood.

In our study of narratives, we started with an excerpt from the Hunger Games and are currently reading a modernized version of the Edgar Allen Poe story 'The Cask of Amontillado'. We will be reading additional short stories to examine the above concepts.

And the flip side to reading...is always WRITING!

Time permitting, I'm hoping to cap this unit off with student's exploring their own narratives through short fiction writing.

Also, narratives will be included as an option for the final persuasive writing assignment in mid April--a multi-paragraph persuasive essay/review. Students will be writing a review on a video game, movie --or narrative--of their choice as a way to exemplify and consolidate the skills we have been working on with the previous two reviews.