CKLA Grade 8: Resources for English Language Learners

Focus:
This unit focuses on examining poetry, short stories, essays, and speeches. Students will read selections from Realms of Gold, Volume 3 by various authors.

The unit allows students to study literary techniques unique to poetry, and exposes them to philosophical ideas and emotional issues not always present in prose. Poetry invites students to play with the power of language as a form of expression, highlighting the connections between form and meaning. In this unit, students will read poetry that crosses time, history, gender, and culture and asks them to consider the rules of Standard English in new ways. What is the rule? Why should it be followed? How does breaking the rule in this poem influence meaning or tone?

Students will look at the structure of storytelling through short stories, and will read several essays and speeches containing arguments, explanations, and/or opinions.

Students will focus on sound, structure, meaning, and shifts in voice and mood, and focus on the Greek and Latin roots ago/acta, brevis, verbum, and port. The writing assignment is to write and publish a poem.

Note: The Student Reader is not available as a free download. Please visit our bookstore to purchase copies.

Number of Lessons: 9

Instruction Time:
90 minutes (Each lesson is broken down in to 45-minute segments.)

Additional Search Terms:
diction • meter • allusion • couplet • free verse • personification • enjambment • sonnet

Focus:
This unit focuses on examining culture and identity within events following the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Students will read selections from an adapted Core Knowledge version of The Squatter and the Don by María Ruiz de Burton, the first Mexican-American woman to publish novels in the English language. Born in 1832 to an elite Mexican family living in Baja California, Maria married an American general, Henry S. Burton. They settled on a ranch outside San Diego, California but then moved to the East Coast. After Henry died, Maria returned to her ranch to find that it was occupied by squatters who first came during the Gold Rush around 1849. These experiences provide the basis for Ruiz de Burton’s 1885 book, The Squatter and the Don.

During this unit, students will write an informative essay and  work on grammar skills involving verb moods. Students will also study the morphology of words using the Greek and Latin roots totus, tractum, usus, vacuus, verto, and via.

Number of Lessons: 9

Instruction Time:
90 minutes (Each lesson is broken down in to 45-minute segments.)

Additional Search Terms:
dramatic irony • foreshadowing • mood

Focus:
This unit focuses on examining various civil rights movements in the United States. Students will read selections from A More Perfect Union: Voices for Civil Rights in America, a collection of speeches, memoirs, interviews, letters, and other documents by people who spoke out and acted for civil rights in the United States. The different perspectives, ideas, and opinions represented in the Reader will allow students to explore the diverse viewpoints, objectives, and tactics of people who struggled to obtain their rights.

The struggles described in A More Perfect Union: Voices for Civil Rights in America are still relevant today. Students will have opportunities to think about and compare the struggles of the past with the work for social justice that remains to be done today, and in the future.

Number of Lessons: 12

Instruction Time:
90 minutes (Each lesson is broken down into 45-minute segments.)

Additional Search Terms:
primary source • discrimination • racial identity • Reconstruction Amendments • separate but equal • Jim Crow • desegregation • internment • color barrier • boycott • nonviolent protest • massive resistance • Freedom Ride • Bloody Sunday • Voting Rights Act

Focus:
This unit examines the Harlem Renaissance, a Black cultural movement in the early 1900s that took place primarily in Harlem, a predominantly Black neighborhood in New York City. The Harlem Renaissance was the result of a variety of factors—the most important of which was the legal racial discrimination and segregation implemented in many southern states after Reconstruction, through the Black Codes or the Jim Crow laws. As a result, when jobs opened up in Northern cities during World War I, many Black people left the Southern states and settled in neighborhoods like Harlem.

During the Harlem Renaissance, there was a burst of Black art, from music to literature to visual art. Much of this art encouraged viewers to embrace the idea of Black pride and a variety of Black experiences beyond stereotypes. The Harlem Renaissance set the stage for Black artists for decades, and even now continues to inspire Black cultural production. Students will engage with some of this art as well as popular debates of the time.

In this unit, students write and publish a multimedia report and work on grammar skills involving conventions of citations and bibliographies.

Number of Lessons: 7

Instruction Time:
90 minutes (Each lesson is broken into 45-minute segments.)

Additional Search Terms:
cultural significance • passing • jazz

Focus:
In  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, students examine the autobiography of a formerly enslaved person. Douglass published his autobiography fifteen years before Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States, Born into enslavement, Douglass became a world-renowned orator and abolitionist after running away from his enslavers. His autobiography tells the story of his life from his birth through his early years as a fugitive.

Douglass provides intimate details about enslavement throughout the book. He shares not only his own stories but the stories of other people that he heard or witnessed. Through these tales, Douglass presents a view of the institution of enslavement that demonstrates how it impacted every aspect of his life, and the lives of the enslaved and enslavers around him. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave illustrates an important part of U.S. history helpful for understanding race relations today.

Students will read selections from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and will write a personal narrative. They will also focus on understanding the genre of  autobiography, recognizing literary devices, and analyzing literature within a historical context.

Number of Lessons: 9

Instruction Time:
90 minutes (Each lesson is broken into 45-minute segments.)

Additional Search Terms:
enslavement • enslavers • abolition • orator

Focus:
Unit 2, Frankenstein or; The Modern Prometheus, focuses on the features of horror stories and science fiction, which are combined in Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was just nineteen years old.

The story introduces the archetypal mad scientist in Dr. Frankenstein, as well as the misunderstood loner in his monster. Shelley offers a warning about the dangers of science and what happens when man “plays God.” The conflict between man and nature is demonstrated in various ways; in the end, nature proves to be the victor. At the end of the novel, nature takes on a menacing new meaning, as Frankenstein chases his monster through the Arctic wilderness.

Frankenstein or; the Modern Prometheus is filled with adventure, mystery, intrigue, and horror. Shelley’s characters and their exploration of universal themes of alienation and death make this a classic of both the science fiction and horror genres.

In terms of literary skills, students will focus on narrators and point of view, character development, the influence of setting, theme development, foreshadowing, and suspense. Students will also compare the influence of real-world ideas and settings to the way these ideas and settings are used in the text.

Number of Lessons: 9

Instruction Time:
90 minutes (Each lesson is broken into 45-minute segments.)

Additional Search Terms:
allusion • foreshadowing • archetype • dramatic irony • point of view • verbals • gerund