Unit 5: Culminating Tasks

Understanding Literary Language and Point of View
Standards: ELAGSE9-10RL4, ELAGSE9-10RL6, ELAGSE9-10W3
Traditions and Culture
Select a story, book, or play you have read that includes characters or events from another part of the world.
Think about the point of view of the characters or the events that represent a different cultural experience from someone living in the United States.

Choose a passage, chapter, or excerpt. Answer the following questions:
• What is the writer’s culture?
• What makes the cultural experience within the passage unique?
• How is this experience different from your own culture?

Write a similar piece reflecting your own cultural experiences.
• Base your writing on your own family or a family that you know.
• Use literary devices, such as figurative language, word choice, and imagery, in your writing.
• Address the question “How are your family traditions different or unique in some way?”

 

Sample Performance-based/Standards-based Task(s) from GADOE Guidance Document 

ELAGSE9-10RL6: Facilitate an interactive web-based communications experience between your students and a class of students from another culture (various avenues for creating these connections already exist, like One World Classroom at http://www.ccph.com/, or join other classrooms around the world in following National Geographic journalist Paul Salopek in his Out of Eden Walk at www.outofedenwalk.com). Local students may choose a myth that they feel is representative of their classroom or culture and will ask their partner classroom to do the same. Students will interact through a web connection to discuss their mythologies and the similarities and differences in their cultures.  

 

ELAGSE9-10RI6:Provide students with a variety of articles and essays that clearly use pathos, logos, or ethos to advance their claims. Have students read and reread the articles, then choose one to highlight and annotate to attempt to identify the rhetorical approach most prevalent in the piece. Students will then rewrite the article or essay changing the focus of the appeal to one of the other two focuses (they may use imaginary elements or their own background knowledge). For example, a student might begin by analyzing an essay on spaying and neutering pets that focuses on starving and abused pets roaming the streets (pathos). They will first quantify the effects of this strategy (for example: in paragraph 2, line 5, the author may lose some readers through the graphic description of the pet who was run over), then rewrite the piece to focus instead on, for example, the financial impact on the city’s budget of failing to spay or neuter pets (logos).