Common Core Literacy Lesson Plans

Ready-to-Use Resources, 9-12

Lauren Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781596672253
• eBook ISBN: 9781317922094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Schools nationwide are transitioning to the Common Core--our advice to you: Be prepared, but don't go it alone! Our new book, Common Core Literacy Lesson Plans: Ready-to-Use Resources, 9-12, shows you that teaching the Common Core State Standards in high school doesn't have to be intimidating!

This easy-to-use guide meets the particular needs of high school teachers. It provides model lesson plans for teaching the standards in reading, writing, speaking/listening, and language.

• Get engaging lesson plans that are grade-appropriate for teens, easy to implement, and include ready-to-use reproducible handouts, assessments, resources, and ideas to help you modify the lesson for both struggling and advanced learners.
• Our Common Core Literacy Lesson Plans are equally effective for both English and content-area teachers—the plans are designed to fit seamlessly into your high school curriculum.
• You get practical tips for revamping your existing lessons to meet the standards.
• High school students learn how to answer text-based questions, read informational texts, conduct research, write arguments, and improve their speaking and listening skills.

We take the guesswork out of Common Core lesson plans with this practical, easy-to-use guide. All lesson plans are grade-appropriate, but every lesson plan includes...

• Common Core State Standards covered in the lesson
• Overview of objectives and focus of the lesson
• Background knowledge required and time required
• A detailed, step-by-step agenda for the lesson, plus a materials list
• Differentiation ideas to adapt the lesson for different kinds of learners
• Assessment ideas, including rubrics and scoring guides
• A place for your notes: what worked; what can improve

Bonus! We show you how to extend the lessons into longer units to suit your particular grade's curriculum, and even help you create more of your own lessons!

Overview

To teach the Common Core State Standards in reading, you don’t have to toss all your wonderful literature lessons and start from scratch. But you do need to look at your lessons and see if they match the rigor level the standards now require. If they don’t, see what you can do to make them more challenging. Begin by making sure that your texts are complex enough and that they span the different genres the CCSS require. If they don’t, see what you can swap out. Then look at how you teach the readings. The Common Core requires that students spend a great deal of time on the language of the text and that they respond to higher-level, text-based questions and tasks. If you teach Romeo and Juliet by having students make personal connections to the theme of love, that’s fine but move that toward the end of your unit. Don’t spend too much time at the beginning on the very general questions. Start with a closer look at Shakespeare’s language, and make sure that students refer to the text when they answer questions and make inferences. For more tips to keep in mind when revising your lessons or creating new lessons, read the following checklist.

Planning Checklist

When planning a CCSS-based reading lesson, remember these tips:

□  Choose more complex texts. According to page 4 of the Common Core State Standards Appendix A, you should consider these three areas when choosing complex texts:

▪  Qualitative measures—your professional judgment about a text’s quality. Does the text have levels of meaning, such as satire? What’s the purpose of the text, and what background knowledge is required?

▪  Quantitative measures—a more technical way to rate a text. You can use a scale such as a Lexile, which looks at word frequency and sentence length.

▪  Reader to text/task—your judgment as a teacher who knows your students! For example, is the text developmentally appropriate for your students?

Make sure to consider all three areas; don’t rely on Lexiles alone. Lexiles can be misleading. For example, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises has a grade 2 Lexile level because the language is relatively simple. However, you would never teach it in that grade. Use your professional judgment when choosing complex texts.

□  Measure students’ reading levels and monitor their progress throughout the year. You can use running records such as the Developmental Reading Assessment, Qualitative Reading Inventory, or Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System. Or you can do your own fluency check by having students read something at the high end of the Common Core recommendations and then check for accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. Make a plan in your mind for how you’d like students to progress, and monitor them throughout the year (Calkins, Ehrenworth, & Lehman, 2012, p. 43).

□  Teach short, challenging texts that can be read and reread so that students have plenty of opportunities to ponder meaning. Also teach extended readings so that students learn “stamina and persistence” while reading (Coleman and Pimentel, 2012, p. 4).

□  If you haven’t been doing so already, make sure to include literary nonfiction in your curriculum. Literary nonfiction, according to the Common Core, means stories built on arguments and with informational text structures, not stories and memoirs.

□  Teach texts from a variety of “genres, cultures, and centuries” (Common Core State Standards, 2010, p. 35).

□  Ask text-dependent tasks and questions. Help students learn to make valid inferences with text support.

□  Provide opportunities for students to compare and synthesize multiple sources.

□  Analyze informational and argumentative aspects of a story, not just its literary features (such as plot, setting, character, etc.).

□  Create questions that build in a logical sequence. Don’t start too broadly (as can happen with some kinds of prereading questions); pose questions that focus on the details of a text. After that, you can go broader and ask for students’ opinions and personal connections.

□  Some students will need scaffolding to understand complex texts. Scaffolding should not consist of “translating” a story or providing a brief synopsis for students to read ahead of time. Instead, scaffolding should help students with words and phrases so that they can determine meaning on their own. Here are some additional strategies for helping struggling readers.

Strategies for Helping Struggling Readers

▪  Model thinking aloud. For example, say, “I’m not sure I understand this word, but the author is writing about tornadoes, and the sentence right after uses the word strength, so I’m paying attention to how powerful tornadoes are.”

▪  Focus on syntax. Students might need practice linking the subject to the verb. In complex texts, such as Shakespeare, the predicate often precedes the subject, which can be confusing for students. They might need to mark up the subject and verb until they learn how to read that kind of language more readily.

▪  Have students annotate the text as they read.

▪  Have students read some short texts (or small chunks of a text at a time) and reread them several times to ponder meaning. They can also listen to an audio version or read a text aloud to gain additional meaning.

▪  Teach when (and how) to use context clues and when to use reference sources to check word meanings.

▪  Use text sets. For example, if you’re teaching Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, you may wish to pair it with articles about Puritanism in Massachusetts.

▪  Allow time for recreational reading, not just methodical close readings. Students need to learn to read for different purposes, including for entertainment.

▪  Create prereading activities as long as they do not spoil or give away the meaning and ideas of the text. Prereading activities might include help with vocabulary or with background information.

Lesson Plans at a Glance

Lesson Plan 1	One Word at a Time: Doing a Close Textual Analysis
Lesson Plan 2	Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch: Parallel Plots and Story Pacing
Lesson Plan 3	Foreign yet Familiar: Images of Culture in World Literature
Lesson Plan 4	Are You Convinced? Analyzing a Speaker’s Rhetoric
Lesson Plan 5	Where’s the Logic? Analyzing an Argument
	Handout—Identifying Logical Fallacies
Lesson Plan 6	What’s the Spin? How Different Mediums Portray Things Differently
	Handout—How Does the Media Spin a Story?
Lesson Plan 7	Time to Dig Deeper: Answering Text-Based Questions
	Handout—Answering a Text-Based Question St...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the Editor
• Contents
• Free Downloads
• Note to Teachers
• Part 1: Reading
• Part 2: Writing
• Part 3: Speaking and Listening
• Part 4: Language
• Appendix A: Selecting Rich, Complex Texts for Student Reading
• Appendix B: Sample Argument Writing Prompts
• Appendix C: Blank Lesson Plan Template
• References