• Students will read, listen to, and/or teach each other about the literacy histories of several individuals (primarily men of color) who struggled with reading as children and worked hard to overcome those challenges and become better readers and, in most cases, agents of change in their families and communities.
• The texts students read in this unit were recommended in Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms (Schoenbach et al., Jossey-Bass, 1999) and can be found in its companion text: Building Academic Literacy: An Anthology for Reading Apprenticeship (Fielding, A. & Schoenbach, R., eds., Jossey-Bass, 2003).
• While learning about the literacy histories mentioned above, students will be asked to reflect on their own literacy histories and begin creating short-term and long-term academic goals for themselves. Students will express some of these goals in "Where I'm Going" form poems based on their "Where I'm From" poems written in College Readiness.
• At the beginning of this unit, students will take a survey on their reading attitudes and behaviors. They will take the same survey at the end of the first semester and at the end of the school year.
• At the end of this unit, students will take an open-note quiz asking them to make connections between the literacy histories they have studied and between the same and their own literacy histories.
  

Students will be able to:

• Answer the question: How does reading affect our society?
• Identify why they are taking Verbal Reasoning and how raising their reading levels will help them be successful in high school and college.
• Articulate -- on a basic level -- the relationship between race, socioeconomic class, and literacy in the United States. This ties into what students are studying in English I and College Readiness during this unit. This is also a response to the essential question.
• Identify some general short-term and long-term academic or educational goals for themselves.
• Identify some actions other previously struggling readers have taken to overcome their reading challenges.
• Compare and contrast information presented in two different texts.

In this unit, students will learn a sequential inference process using graphic organizers and a group game using familiar situations from their lives. They will practice their new inference skills by reading "Ordeal by Cheque" (written by Wuther Crue and originally published in "Vanity Fair"), which is a short story written entirely in bank checks. In addition, students will learn about sentence combining and begin working with a set of "glue words" (before, after, who, which). Students will use these glue words to rewrite the story of "Ordeal by Cheque" in narrative form. At the end of this unit, students will practice using inductive reasoning to create their own versions of "Ordeal by Cheque" to tell stories from their own lives.

Students will be able to:

• follow a sequential inference process to make judgments based on prior knowledge and information provided in a text
• combine sentences using "glue words" (before, after, who, which)
  
• produce a text written in checks that demonstrates a familiarity with inductive reasoning, though not necessarily proficiency with such

In this unit, students read The Tequila Worm (Viola Canales, 2005) in Verbal Reasoning while they read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (Sherman Alexie, 2007) in English I. This unit's essential question is: what sacrifices do people make to improve their lives? This question works in conjunction with the English I essential question, "do all people have equal access to education?" and the College Readiness essential question, "what does it take to get into the college of my choosing?" In order to work toward answering the unit questions and practice writing questions at different levels, students conduct interviews with immigrants about their immigration experiences and use the interview notes as evidence for one of the two essays they will write in this unit. In addition, students take regular journal-style reading quizzes on the book, discuss the book in book groups, and take one quiz on levels of questioning followed by another on sentence combining. At the end of this unit, student take their first semester final exam, which includes all of the concepts and skills in this unit and the two preceding units.

The students will be able to:

• answer the question: What sacrifices do people make in order to improve their lives?   
  
• answer the question: What sacrifices are you willing to make in order to improve your family’s life?    
  
• identify some of the challenges facing immigrants today
• identify the six journalistic question words
• use questioning as a strategy to monitor their reading comprehension
• identify and explain three levels of questions
• create and respond to questions on all three levels of questioning
• associate each of the directive verbs with levels of questioning and levels of Bloom's Taxonomy
• combine sentences using glue words (related to time and place)
• writing questions using standard English word order (including question markers)
  

In this unit, students read Give a Boy a Gun (Todd Strasser) -- written entirely in block quotations -- in a series of staged readings in which each student is assigned a character. Students also read several newspaper articles on school violence and watch “Bowling for Columbine.” Students use a rubric to assess each other's oral reading. In addition, students use "analysis trees" (tree-shaped graphic organizers) to practice analyzing quotations and create posters analyzing statistics from Give a Boy a Gun. Formal assessments in this unit include several quizzes on glue words and sentence combining as well as a unit test at the end of this unit, which covers all of the concepts and skills in this unit.

Students will be able to:

• Answer the question: Who or what is responsible for violence in our society?
• Explain how words in English have been (and continue to be) formed using prefixes, suffixes, and roots of Greek and Latin derivation
• Use word parts (Latin roots) to analyze and decode unknown words
• Combine sentences using glue words, specifically transitions and glue words related to result or consequence
• Explain and demonstrate the qualities of strong oral reading

we will be reading "The House of the Scorpion" (Nancy Farmer) and several newspaper articles on human cloning.Reading quizzes on The House of the Scorpion
2.    One analysis essay and several analytical paragraphs
3.    A debate on human cloning
4.    A unit test at the end of this unit – your final exam

Students will be able to: 

• Answer the question: Should human cloning be legalized?
  
• Explain what human cloning is and provide solid arguments supporting both sides of the human cloning debate.
• Determine the most important information presented in short, non-fiction (newspaper) sources.
• Use concessive sentence stems to create concessive arguments.
• Prepare for and participate in a highly structured debate.