Reading and Writing for Assessment teaches your students the close-reading and on-demand writing skills they need to succeed on the Common Core assessments for high school English, the ACT and SAT, and the AP English assessments. Instructions, activities, examples, interactives, and downloads help students learn new strategies for analyzing informational texts and writing analyses and arguments about them. You can also present this unit right from your interactive whiteboard.
First students warm up by closely reading and responding to an article. Then students write basic analyses of their own in response to a prompt. Afterward, they are primed to learn close-reading and on-demand writing strategies:
Close-Reading Strategies
Close-reading activities help students gain these skills:
- Using the 5 W's and H (journalistic questions) to closely read any text
- Finding, analyzing, and inferring controlling sentences (thesis statements and topic sentences)
- Finding and analyzing supporting details (facts, statistics, examples, definitions, quotations, and so on)
- Using evidence from sources and citing the source
- Understanding vocabulary using word parts and context clues
On-Demand Writing Strategies
On-demand writing activities help students gain these skills:
- Analyzing writing prompts to understand the purpose, audience, subject, and type of writing
- Budgeting time for on-demand free-response essays using a compacted writing process
- Developing a response to a writing prompt
- Using a checklist to quickly review the written response and make improvements