Reading and Writing for Literature 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 Literature and Composition assessment. Instructions, activities, examples, interactives, and downloads help students learn new strategies for analyzing literature and writing analyses about it. You can also present this unit right from your interactive whiteboard.
First students warm up by closely reading and responding to a short work and a related poem. Then students write basic analyses of their own in response to a prompt about the works. Afterward, they are primed to learn close-reading and on-demand writing strategies:
Close-Reading Strategies
Close-reading activities help students gain these skills:
- Analyzing literature according to character, conflict, plot, setting, literary devices, and theme
- Describing characters physically and psychologically, defining their greatest desires and fears and the conflicts that arise from them
- Analyzing literary devices including description, action, dialogue, metaphor, and mood
- Analyzing poetic devices including imagery, symbolism, sound, meter, repetition, and rhyme
- Inferring theme by interpreting clues in literature and poetry
- Using context clues to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words
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