ILP Big 6+ ELA Projects: 10th Grade GLE (Lit Themes & NF)

This is a collaborative lesson taught by both the classroom teacher and the school librarian. Get in contact with your school librarian early to discuss scheduling and teaching responsibilities.

This lesson plan is a guideline. If you need to make minor adjustments or changes to best suit the needs of your students or the resources in your building, please do so. If you have questions about the curricular requirements, please contact Shelley Erickson or Julie Schik.

At the completion of this lesson, you will need to send two student examples each of a level 2, 3, and 4 project to your curriculum specialist or department head who will in turn submit them to your supervisor.  This can be electronically or as a hard copy.

Teacher— At the end of each unit, discuss the larger topics and themes of the literature.  From those topics and themes, any controversies, issues or connections to community, country or world events will be discussed.  From that discussion, students will be asked to seek out non-fictions texts that address, explore, challenge, extrapolate or further your understanding of the topic/issue. (Project Info Sheet Included)

Teacher will introduce the requirements for the project.  (See Synthesis & Sharing)

Formative Assessment: Verify all information is recorded on student handouts (can be a visual check or graded assessment)

With direct instruction from the school librarian (with support from the classroom teacher) on search strategies and recommended resources, students will locate required information about their selected theme:

• 3 nonfiction texts that explore, challenge, or interact with each identified theme

Possible Sources of information:

• Gale Opposing Viewpoints in Context
• Points of View Reference Center (NebraskAccess)
• EbscoHost

Your librarian will use your school's direct links to the following district databases when working with students.

Formative Assessment:  Consistent and frequent verbal and visual checks with student to assess if they are able to access quality resources.

Teacher will guide students through transferring information into a notes organizer. (TBD by teacher and/or self-selected by students).

With direct instruction and support from the school librarian, students will create citations for their sources.  Recommendation to use district subscription to Noodle Tools.  Teacher will provide instruction on internal citations.

Formative Assessment:  Visual checks for completion.  And/or, individual conferencing with students to determine if ready to move on to synthesis and sharing.

Teacher will review the requirements for the final project and assist students as necessary. (Final Product Info Sheet included).

There will be 4 major thematic units during the semester.  For each thematic unit, you will be expected to:

• Have a 1 page analysis of a thematic statement that is the guiding focus for your search for texts.
• Find 3 non-fiction texts that explore, challenge, or interact in some way with the identified theme.  It may be most interesting to find texts that come at the thematic statement from multiple perspectives, if possible.  Out of the 3, evaluate which 2 are the most relevant and discard the irrelevant text.  Write a paragraph explaining why you rejected the third text.
• Read, annotate and include copies of both chosen texts in the most ethically acceptable format (i.e. don’t simply copy and paste from the internet, find an original copy of both texts, if possible).
• Write a 1-2 page analysis of how each text you found explores, challenges, interacts, or furthers your thinking around the thematic statement previously identified.  This analysis should include a basic summary of both texts (this should be very brief and not take up more than a paragraph of the entire analysis), identify the connection between the text and the thematic statement and analyze what the non-fiction text adds to the conversation started by the author of the class text around the identified thematic statement.

Formative Assessment: Rough draft feedback.

Summative Assessment: Use provided rubric to grade final product.

Teacher will guide students as they complete the self-evaluation form containing teacher selected items from the form included below.

The self-evaluation can be as brief (one question) or as long as the teacher deems necessary.  This can be a graded or non-graded activity.         

Noodletools provides a format for creating research papers.  It provides an area for notetaking, citation creation, and paper formation.

Guides for using Noodle Tools

This 20 minute video gives an overview on how to use NoodleTools.

This video shows how to create a new project.

This video shows how to check the format of your citation.

This video shows how to add a preformatted citation from a database or website.