CONTENTS

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Other Books by Common Core

Foreword

Good Schools: The Salt of Society

From the Writers

Introduction

How to Use the Common Core Curriculum: English

Grade 6

Grade 6, Unit 1: I Won’t Grow Up

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 6, Unit 2: Folklore

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 6, Unit 3: Embracing Heritage

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Resources

Terminology

Grade 6, Unit 4: Courageous Characters

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 6, Unit 5: Figure It Out

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 6, Unit 6: Winging It

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 7

Grade 7, Unit 1: Characters with Character

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 7, Unit 2: Perseverance

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 7, Unit 3: Courage in Life and in Literature

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 7, Unit 4: Survival in the Wild

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 7, Unit 5: Science or Fiction?

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 7, Unit 6: Literature Reflects Life

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 8

Grade 8, Unit 1: Urban Settings in America

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 8, Unit 2: Rural Settings in North America

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 8, Unit 3: Looking Back on America

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 8, Unit 4: Authors and Artists

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 8, Unit 5: Dramatically Speaking

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Grade 8, Unit 6: “The Road Not Taken”

Overview

Focus Standards

Suggested Objectives

Suggested Works

Sample Activities and Assessments

Additional Online Resources

Terminology

Sample Text Study

Text Study A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

Suggestions for Use

Common Core State Standards Alignment

Vocabulary

Text Study

Performance Assessment

Text Fluency

Acknowledgments

Who Is Common Core

Index of Suggested Works

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Common Core Curriculum: English,
Grades 6–8

Second Edition

Cover design: Chris Clary
Cover image: Homer, Winslow (1836-1910), The Gulf Stream, 1899, Oil on canvas.
Image copyright: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Image source: Art Resource, NY

Copyright © 2014 by Common Core, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Common core curriculum: English, grades 6-8. — Second edition.
pages cm. — (Common core english language arts)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-118-81134-4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-118-84671-1 (ebk.)
ISBN 978-1-118-84679-7 (ebk.)
1. Language arts (Secondary)—Curricula—United States—States. 2. Language arts (Secondary) — Standards—United States—States.
LB1631.C657C65 2014
372.6'044—dc23

2013045496

Other Books by Common Core

The Wheatley Portfolio

Common Core Curriculum: English, Grades K–5, Second Edition

Common Core Curriculum: English, Grades 9–12, Second Edition

The Alexandria Plan

Common Core Curriculum: United States History, Grades K–2

Common Core Curriculum: World History, Grades K–2

Common Core Curriculum: United States History, Grades 3–5

Common Core Curriculum: World History, Grades 3–5

Eureka Math

Common Core Mathematics: A Story of Units, Grades K–5

Common Core Mathematics: A Story of Ratios, Grades 6–8

Common Core Mathematics: A Story of Functions, Grades 9–12

Foreword

Good Schools: The Salt of Society

Three hundred years ago Cotton Mather preached, “A Good School deserves to be call’d the very Salt of the Town that hath it.” Without a school “wherein the Youth may by able Masters be Taught the Things that are necessary to qualify them for future Serviceableness,” a community will founder. ¹ Mather’s advice to townspeople in Puritan New England reflects one of the philosophical underpinnings of the Common Core Curriculum in English Language Arts: Schools matter. Curriculum matters. Teachers matter.

In order to determine which things should be taught, we must of course first define what it means to be serviceable in a twenty-first-century democratic society. To ensure a capable workforce and build a strong economy, high levels of literacy and numeracy are obviously essential. But what about the need for students to develop empathy and thoughtfulness? It is shortsighted to equate the value of education with economic growth. Like salt, good schools with rich curricula enhance the community by adding depth—and piquancy. Like salt, they are a preservative, ensuring that a society’s values endure.

Many of the benefits we’ve come to demand as our rights in a modern society depend on high levels of employment, but if we shift the discussion of the purpose of school from job training to preparing America’s children to lead a worthwhile life, the calculus changes. Is simply working nine to five for forty years what you most aspire to for your children? Or do you want them to have an education that invites exploration of essential questions, inspires challenges to the status quo, and somehow prepares them for what we cannot yet know? Most parents want both.

The conundrum for curriculum developers is to avoid becoming so caught up in preparing students to make a living—which starts with paying attention in kindergarten; earning good grades through elementary school, middle school, and high school; achieving competitive SAT and ACT scores; and winning a place in college or in the workplace—that we lose sight of educating students to enrich their lives.

In Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, philosopher Martha Nussbaum warns that, “With the rush to profitability in the global market, values precious for the future of democracy, especially in an era of religious and economic anxiety, are in danger of getting lost.” ² I share her concern. The movement to reform education primarily in order to make the United States more globally competitive seems wrongheaded and even counterproductive. Maybe I lack a competitive spirit, but I have always wanted more for my students than just coming in first. I want them to learn about and to think about the world—today’s world and yesterday’s. Nussbaum explains, “World history and economic understanding must be humanistic and critical if they are to be at all useful in forming intelligent global citizens, and they must be taught alongside the study of religion and of philosophical theories of justice. Only then will they supply a useful foundation for the public debates that we must have if we are to cooperate in solving major human problems.” ³ One means of learning about the problems that have beset and continue to bedevil humanity is through the study of the humanities—literature and art, history and philosophy. This is the kind of education the Common Core Curriculum offers. I believe it is the education that every generation of citizens needs.

Unit 3 of grade 1, Life Lessons, offers young children opportunities to explore the kind of education Martha Nussbaum recommends. As they work through the unit, “Students read and listen to fables with morals. They also learn about rules for life in a book of manners. Reading the life story of George Washington Carver, students learn about a man who had to overcome obstacles in life to make important contributions to science and agriculture. Students also learn about Thomas Edison’s work with electricity and the rules for its safe use. Students write narratives focused on life lessons and create informative/explanatory posters about electricity. Finally, students focus on descriptive words while studying the artwork of Georgia O’Keeffe.” This interdisciplinary approach integrates the study of science and builds students’ background knowledge. In so doing, it strengthens their reading comprehension and develops their facility with reading informational texts—a key expectation of the Common Core State Standards. It also invites children to investigate Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings and build their cultural literacy.

Some readers of the Common Core Curriculum may argue that their students won’t read nineteenth-century novels, that twenty-first-century students raised on Twitter need a faster pace and different kinds of text. I say language arts classrooms may be the last place where young people can unplug themselves from the solipsism of Facebook postings and enter a milieu different from their own. “But my students won’t do the homework reading I assign,” teachers wail. It isn’t as though students don’t have the time. A 2010 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children ages eight to eighteen spend an average of seven-and-a-half hours daily “consuming entertainment media.” ⁴ And this does not include the hour-and-a-half a day they spend texting friends. Today’s students have the time to read; many of them simply choose not to.

To those who look at the suggested works for the high school Common Core Curriculum and think, “Our students could never read those books,” I urge perusal of the primary grade curriculum. If children were immersed in rich literature and nonfiction from the first days of kindergarten and engaged in classroom conversations that encouraged them to think deeply about what they read, then negotiating Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in eleventh grade and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in twelfth is certainly possible. Though such books pose textual challenges for young readers, as part of a continuum and under the tutelage of an “able Master,” the work is achievable. In our effort to provide students with readings that they can relate to, we sometimes end up teaching works that students can read on their own at the expense of teaching more worthwhile texts that they most certainly need assistance negotiating.

We need to remind ourselves that curriculum should be aimed at what Lev Vygotsky calls students’ zone of proximal development. Writing in 1962, Vygotsky said, “the only good kind of instruction is that which marches ahead of development and leads it.” ⁵ Classroom texts should pose intellectual challenges for readers and invite them to stretch and grow. Students also need books that feed their personal interests and allow them to explore “the road not taken.” Reading a broad range of books makes students stronger readers and, over time, stronger people. Rigor versus relevance doesn’t need to be an either-or proposition. With artful instruction by able masters, students can acquire the literacy skills they need—not only to meet the Common Core State Standards, but also to meet the challenges this brave new world is sure to deal them.

Reading literature also helps students explore hypothetical scenarios and consider the ramifications of what might prima facie seem to be a good or profitable idea. Consider the Common Core Curriculum’s final grade 7 unit, Literature Reflects Life: Making Sense of Our World. Addressing Common Core Reading Standard RL.7.6, “Analyze how an author develops and contrasts the points of view of different characters or narrators in a text,” the curriculum recommends that students read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This nineteenth-century novella invites young readers to reflect on their own conflicting natures and offers a cautionary tale regarding experimentation. When we consider how best to prepare tomorrow’s doctors, scientists, programmers, and engineers for the twenty-first century, it seems to me that reading stories about investigations that go very wrong is quite a good idea.

Later in his sermon, Cotton Mather states that “the Devil cannot give a greater Blow to the Reformation among us, than by causing Schools to Languish under Discouragements.” The Common Core Curriculum offers hope to discouraged teachers. It offers a plan for developing young minds, a plan that is both rigorous and more relevant than ever before. It may seem odd to be taking guidance from a seventeenth-century Puritan, but I know I couldn’t say it better. “Where schools are not vigorously and Honourably Encouraged, whole Colonies will sink apace into a Degenerate and Contemptible Condition, and at last become horribly Barbarous. If you would not betray your Posterity into the very Circumstances of Savages, let Schools have more Encouragement.” Amen.

Carol Jago

Associate Director of the California Reading and Literature Project
at UCLA; Former President of the National Council of Teachers
of English; and Trustee, Common Core, Inc.

Notes

1 Cotton Mather, “The Education of Children,” http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/mather/edkids.htm.

2 Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 6.

3 Ibid., 94.4

4 Ulla G. Foehr, Victoria J. Rideout, and Donald F. Roberts, “Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds” (Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, January 2010), http://www.kff.org/entmedia/8010.cfm.

5 Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962), 104.

From the Writers

To My Fellow Teachers:

Creating this curriculum has been, by far, the most exciting project I have been part of in my twenty-two-year teaching career. As a classroom teacher, I (like many of you) have hung on to the pendulum as it has swung back and forth from prescriptive, mandatory educational initiatives to long periods with no guidance at all—always trying to find a way to provide students with a rich and rigorous education. This curriculum presented us with a perfect opportunity to strike a new balance.

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!