Reading and Writing Literature Assessments teaches your students the close-reading and on-demand writing strategies they need to succeed on the new standards assessments. Instructions, activities, examples, interactives, and downloads help students learn new skills for analyzing literary texts and writing about them. You can also present this unit right from your interactive whiteboard.
First students warm up by closely reading and responding to a story paragraph. Then students write a story paragraph 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:
- Focusing on character, setting, conflict, plot and theme when reading a story
- Analyzing character in terms of physical description, mental description, and needs and wants.
- Analyzing conflict in terms of classic categories (person versus self, person, society, nature, supernatural, or machine)
- Understanding plot (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution)
- Analyzing theme in terms of what a character learns, how a character changes, or what the reader learns about life
- Understanding poetry according to sounds (rhyme, rhythm, repetition) and meanings (metaphors, similes, imagery, and so on)
- Citing evidence from sources using the title and author's name
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 responses using a compacted writing process
- Writing a response to a writing prompt
- Using a checklist to quickly review the written response and make improvements