Making Evidence-Based Claims ELA/Literacy Units empower students with a critical reading and writing skill at the heart of the Common Core: making evidence-based claims about complex texts. These units are part of the Developing Core Proficiencies Program. This unit develops students' €abilities to make evidence-based claims through activities based on a close reading of the Commencement Address Steve Jobs delivered at Stanford University on June, 2005.

Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .

This lesson focuses on the chapter “Chinatown” from Laurence Yep’s memoir, The Lost Garden.  Students will consider the factors that contributed to Yep’s struggle to find a sense of belonging with his peers and in his community.  Students will determine in what ways the essential question (In what ways does our need to feel a sense of belonging conflict with our individuality?) is relevant to Laurence Yep’s experience as he describes it in “Chinatown”.

In this module, students are involved in a deep study of mythology, its purposes, and elements. Students will read Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief (780L), a high-interest novel about a sixth-grade boy on a hero’s journey. Some students may be familiar with this popular fantasy book; in this module, students will read with a focus on the archetypal journey and close reading of the many mythical allusions. As they begin the novel, students also will read a complex informational text that explains the archetypal storyline of the hero’s journey which has been repeated in literature throughout the centuries. Through the close reading of literary and informational texts, students will learn multiple strategies for acquiring and using academic vocabulary. Students will also build routines and expectations of discussion as they work in small groups. At the end of Unit 1, having read half of the novel, students will explain, with text-based evidence, how Percy is an archetypal hero. In Unit 2, students will continue reading The Lightning Thief (more independently): in class, they will focus on the novel’s many allusions to classic myths; those allusions will serve as an entry point into a deeper study of Greek mythology. They also will continue to build their informational reading skills through the close reading of texts about the close reading of texts about the elements of myths. This will create a conceptual framework to support students’ reading of mythology. As a whole class, students will closely read several complex Greek myths. They then will work in small groups to build expertise on one of those myths. In Unit 3, students shift their focus to narrative writing skills. This series of writing lessons will scaffold students to their final performance task in which they will apply their knowledge about the hero’s journey and the elements of mythology to create their own hero’s journey stories.

Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .

This lesson plan centers on a fun, interactive activity that allows students to explore and understand common English idioms.

In this animated video segment adapted from NASA, astronomer Doris Daou explains how the forces of speed and gravity keep the Moon in a constant orbit around Earth.