Within the district curriculum the following significant tasks are noted: Making Student Voices Heard through Text Connections, Using the Reading/Writing Connection to Explore American Values, and Composing a Comparative Literary Analysis.
Through all the text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world connections I will be asking my students to make throughout this unit, "Making Student Voices Heard through Text Connections" will be made possible. Not only will my students share their connections through writing, but they will also share their connections through small group and whole group discussions.
I have chosen a long list of rap songs and poems, which reflect the ideas of American writers. Giving my students the opportunity to read these raps and poems, I can achieve the "Using the Reading/Writing Connection to Explore American Values" task. My students will be asked to read multiple different titles by various American artists and write about these texts. Through this writing, my students will be asked to identify themes and messages within the texts and compare and contrast the various artists' ideas and values.
While there will be small writing assignments all throughout the unit, towards the end of the unit, I will ask my students to compose a longer, more formal comparative literary analysis, in order to achieve the "Composing a Comparative Literary Analysis" task. This formal essay will ask my students to look deeper into the literature they have been reading and compare all the different themes and poetic elements they have been learning about.
