Essential Question:
How do people form friendships in the midst of trouble?
Days 1-2 - SEED 1
Days 3-7 - PLAN 1
Days 8-12 - PLAN 2
Days 13-18 - PLAN 3
Day 19 - SEED 2
Days 20-21 - SEED 3
Days 22-23 - SEED 4
Days 24-30 - PLAN 4
Download Seeds, Plans, and Resources (zip)
Unit Overview
CCSS Standards for this Unit
Monitoring Templates
Send Feedback to MSDE’s Reading Team
Lesson seeds are ideas that can be used to build a lesson aligned to the CCSS. Lesson seeds are not meant to be all-inclusive, nor are they substitutes for instruction. When developing lessons from these seeds, teachers must consider the needs of all learners. It is also important to build checkpoints into the lessons where appropriate formative assessment will inform a teachers instructional pacing and delivery.
The 7th Grade unit titled “Forming Friendships in the Midst of Trouble” focuses on the concept that friends will form bonds in the middle of distressed situations. The conscious understanding that words convey nuances of meaning and style is an essential component to understanding text and drawing a meaningful understanding from it. Mark Twain’s masterful and deliberate use of language in the anchor text, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, provides students with an opportunity to analyze how writers use words and sentence structure to convey a specific meaning and/or purpose; imitate author’s tone and style; and make deliberate choices in their own writing. As they examine related print and non-print text, students will make the connection between the purposeful use of words, images and context to make meaning.
The teacher can create other lesson seeds and lesson plans if the students will read the entire text. Reading the entire text will extend the unit by a few weeks. Teacher discretion is advised when creating additional lesson plans and lesson seeds to meet the needs of the students.
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer has a Lexile score of 950, which is the grade-level equivalent of 5.9, according to http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/book/adventures-tom-sawyer . Other factors that make this an appropriate novel for reading on the 7th grade level are the theme and purpose of the text; the structure of language in terms of conventions and clarity; and the historical aspects of the novel. The complexity of the tasks assigned to the reading also determines its appropriateness.
If print copies of the novel are unavailable, the text can be found in its entirety at the following link: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/sawyr-table.html. Audio for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer can be found here.
TEXT MODELS FOR LESSONS AND LESSON SEEDS
Novels
Informational Text
Speech
Poetry
Shorty Story
Non-Print Texts
Note to Teachers: Consider the need for Accessible Instructional Materials (AIM) and/or for captioned/described video when selecting texts, novels, video and/or other media for this unit. See “Sources for Accessible Media” for suggestions at http://marylandlearninglinks.org/ .
Interdisciiplinary Connections
Additional Resources
