Units of Study:

• Essay Writing: Preparation for PSSA timed-writing in all three modes: argumentative, narrative, expository.  Students will use a specific and clear thesis and support it with reasons and textual evidence. 

• Novel Study: They Had a Dream by Jules Archer.  PSSA open-ended response, vocabulary, non-fiction analysis.

• Novel Study: The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis.  PSSA open-ended response, vocabulary, applying reading strategies, plot elements, and figurative language. 

• Civil Rights Project: Students will research a topic from the Civil Rights timeline, write a summary of their findings and create a website complete with pictures and text to illustrate what they learned.

• Vocabulary: Vocabulary from Latin and Greek Roots: A Study of Word Families I.
• Community Contribution Project/Speech:  Students will write an informative essay on one thing in which they excel. Then, they will find a person in their community who has become successful in that field.  Students will give a short speech utilizing media to demonstrate what they learned.

• Short Stories and Plays: Students will read and analyze a collection of short stories and the play, A Christmas Carol.

• Poetry Unit: Students will analyze a series of poems by professional and student poets.  Students will also write their own poetry using form, figurative language, and other poetic devices.

• Grammar Study: Analysis of proper sentence construction, types of sentence structures, sentence combining, parts of speech, run-on, fragments, agreement, and punctuation.