Waltrina D. Kirkland-Mullins
Meeting Connecticut Educational Standards
This unit correlates with the Connecticut Framework K-12 Curricular Goals and Standards for Language Arts and the Arts. Generally, students will read literary works across genre with understanding and respond thoughtfully to text; create works using the language arts in visual, oral, and written text; understand and appreciate texts from many literary periods and cultures; choose and apply strategies that enhance the fluent and proficient use of language arts; write and speak English proficiently to clearly communicate ideas; use different media, techniques and processes to communicate ideas, feelings, experiences and stories; express their understanding of written text through developing, communicating, and sustaining characters in mime; and employ the language arts and the arts for lifelong learning, work, and enjoyment.
As it pertains to specific content standards, students will be engaged in the following:
Language Arts - Content Standard 1: Reading and Responding. Students will describe their thoughts, opinions, and questions that arise as they read and listen to a text and use relevant information from the text to summarize the content. Students will use what they know to identify characters, settings, themes, events, ideas, relationships, and details found within the text.
Language Arts - Content Standard 2: Producing Texts. Students will work both individually and on a collaborative basis in collecting and examining an array of their literary creations and accompanying illustrations, discussing the features they like, and what they might do differently next time. Students will read/share their creative writings with partners, who will constructively critique the work, highlighting elements in the literary piece that work along with questions they have about the writing.
Language Arts - Content Standard 3: Applying English Language Conventions. Students will understand that words and expressions with which they are familiar convey meaning and in many instances have evolved and/or changed over time.
Language Arts - Content Standard 4: Exploring and Responding to Text. Students will declare their opinions about each of the works read, listened to, and viewed, subsequently evaluating them according to such features as character development, narrator's voice, conflict and theme.
The Arts - Content Standard 2: Acting. Students will imagine and clearly describe characters and their relationship to their environment through mime and locomotive and non-locomotive expression.
The Arts - Content Standard 3: Technical Production. Students will collaboratively plan and prepare improvisations and demonstrate various ways of staging classroom dramatizations for select text. Students will collaborate to constructively organize costumes, make-up, and setting.
"The Jumblies" by Edward Lear. This poetic work is out of copyright and in the public domain in the United States. Since no one controls any rights to this material in the United States, no credit or acknowledgment is required.
"Nathaniel's Rap" from NATHANIEL TALKING by Eloise Greenfield, copyright 1988. Used by permission of HarperCollins.
