Literature - EC: L.F.2.4.1
Continuum of Activities
The list below represents a continuum of activities: resources categorized by Standard/Eligible Content that teachers may use to move students toward proficiency. Using LEA curriculum and available materials and resources, teachers can customize the activity statements/questions for classroom use.
This continuum of activities offers:
- Instructional activities designed to be integrated into planned lessons
- Questions/activities that grow in complexity
- Opportunities for differentiation for each student’s level of performance
Grade Levels
Commencement
Course, Subject
English Language Arts, Literature
Related Academic Standards / Eligible Content
Activities
- Identify the historical background, setting and time period of a text.
- Identify any relevant or important cultural issues in a text.
- Compare how the historical setting of a text is depicted to a nonfiction description of that setting.
- Identify any literary techniques and/or patterns that mark a text as significant or different from other texts.
- Analyze how a text portrays a particular aspect of culture.
- Compare and synthesize a primary document from the time period of a fictional text to a relevant theme in the text itself.
Answer Key/Rubric
- Students accurately define, with the help of primary documents and outside resources, the historical background, setting and time period of a text. Students recall the defining characteristics—social, cultural and political—of this setting.
- By making text-to-world connections, students accurately identify the use of contemporary or historic cultural issues as themes in a fiction text.
- Using a visual (film, photo, painting) or written (primary document, poem, other fiction) description of a historic setting, students compare the setting of a fictional text. Students observe patterns, commonalities, and primary themes and characteristics.
- Students observe unique, author or genre specific uses of literary techniques that set a work of fiction apart from another. Students identify and observe noteworthy or different aspects of a narrative that distinguish the work for its literary significance.
- Students analyze, critique or argue how a particular cultural issue (contemporary or historic) is portrayed in a fiction text. Students observe and argue whether a text was intended to illustrate, highlight, satirize or criticize a particular cultural issue, depending on its treatment and portrayal in a text.
- Students compare nonfiction (documentary, speech, primary document, newspaper article) to a fictional text in order to analyze a relevant theme from the time period. Students analyze how a fictional text represents this theme, how it is explored and developed, and for what purpose.
Suggested Rubric: This rubric may be used to assess a student’s overall mastery of the standard or eligible content.
