Dystopian Book Clubs
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1 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Reading Curricular Calendar, Eighth Grade, 2017-2018 Unit 3 - Dystopian Book Clubs Unit 3 – Dystopian Book Clubs January Welcome to the Unit In this unit you push your readers toward deep comprehension from the get-go through the study of dystopian texts in clubs. Additionally, there will be a new strand of focus on literary terms, analysis and critique. And finally, you’ll continue emphasizing (or re-invigorate) volume, stamina, and voracious reading. While at first glance this may seem like a lot to accomplish in one unit, there are ways of putting these elements together that will actually help make accomplishing all these goals much more manageable. Reading fantasy and dystopian series gets kids into highly engaging, complicated novels, which have a rich literary history stemming back to Tolkien and Orwell. In this unit, you will hook your students into reading in your classroom through the genre they are most likely to have picked up over their summer vacations, have tucked into their backpacks and beside their beds at home. There are many reasons that adolescents are so drawn to this genre. Perhaps chief amongst them is what Laurence Yep has said, “Fantasy is closer to our emotional realities than realistic fiction.” That is, sometimes walking down the school hallway feels like so much more than just walking down the school hallway. It can feel much more like battling an all-powerful wizard or a malevolent city-state. Fantasy, and one sub-genre of it, dystopian fantasy, can often carry the gravitas of our students’ emotional realities in a way no other type of text can. Adolescents see their lives and their struggles as one and the same as the heroes and heroines who go on epic quests and wage impossible battles. The literary traditions of dystopian literature are inherently complex. There is complexity to the other worlds, themes and symbols, and archetypal characters readers will find, no matter what the reading level. It is also one of the genres most read by teens and adults for pleasure. Because so many teen readers find dystopian novels fascinating, and there is so much contemporary cultural support for this tradition, you may be able to lead some of your strong readers successfully into classic and contemporary texts more geared for adults as well. The reader who loves Suzanne Collins is well-poised on a trajectory towards Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, or Margaret Atwood. Though there is a great deal of crossover between readers of fantasy, science fiction, and dystopia, this unit particularly is aimed toward reading dystopian novels -- novels where something has gone terribly wrong, whether it’s a government breakdown or environmental disaster, and now the characters have to survive in the world they have inherited. You may find it challenging to find dystopian novels below level U or so -- the vast majority are clustered in the XYZ band of text complexity. If most of your readers are reading below this level, you might instead decide to use the 6th grade fantasy write-up. Again and again the TCRWP has found that the best way to deepen thinking and increase engagement, while also quickly forging relationships in the classroom is to read in the company of others. In this unit you will set students up to read in clubs. Knowing that book resources vary, we recommend a couple of different club configurations. The first, and perhaps most common and familiar, are book clubs, with each member reading the same books at the same time. Another option, which will be discussed at more length later in this write-up, is to have students reading Duplicate with permission only Please contact [email protected] DRAFT 2017-2018 © 2 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Reading Curricular Calendar, Eighth Grade, 2017-2018 Unit 3 - Dystopian Book Clubs different texts, but organized around a similar theme or concept. This option works best in classrooms where there are not enough copies of each title on offer to support ‘same book’ clubs. The work in this unit is anchored by several short stories that include both older, classic stories and modern texts. One of the short stories you might choose, “All Summer In a Day” by Ray Bradbury, will also be the basis for some core student work in Literary Essays from Units of Study in Argument, Information and Narrative Writing, which might be the parallel or subsequent writing unit of study. We also recommend that students read dystopian books in clubs so that students are driving themselves and their classmates to continue to turn the pages and push themselves to comprehend every labyrinthine nook and cranny of the texts. As a note, we expect to announce the publication of this unit in a Units of Study book in late fall 2017, in time to teach this unit with the support of the book. At this time there is no definitive date for publication, therefore we are including this curricular calendar. If for any reason you choose to teach this unit sooner than January, and need to rely on this write-up rather than the book, you should know that we stand by the teaching in this calendar. Teachers have used this calendar for several years with great success and, in fact, the work schools have done with it has informed the development of the Units of Study book. Overview Essential Questions: • Bend I: Readers make sense of strange worlds and consider their relationship to historical or contemporary societies How can I use strategies from reading other genres in order to make sense of imaginary, often complicated worlds? In what ways does my understanding of these worlds affect underlying ideas the text is highlighting—ideas that might also offer insights or critiques of my own world? • Bend II: Deepening thematic analysis What are ways I can look at themes that live in each of the texts that I read? How can I trace not only the themes across the text, but the details which support each theme? • Bend III: Comparing and contrasting thematic development across texts What are ways I can see how themes travel across texts?? How can I be sure that with each subsequent text I read, I strengthen my reading by compounding my understanding with the themes from all the texts that came before it? • Bend IV: Analyzing literary traditions How does noticing some traditional literary techniques, themes and archetypes that I see playing out in the stories I have read help strengthen my understanding of those stories? How can seeing those same patterns in my life and in world events help me make sense of them as well? Anchor Texts: • “All Summer in A Day” by Ray Bradbury • “Ponies” by Kij Johnson (http://www.tor.com/2010/11/17/ponies/) as a possible alternative anchor text • “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut • First chapter of The Hunger Games or Divergent and the film clip Duplicate with permission only Please contact [email protected] DRAFT 2017-2018 © 3 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Reading Curricular Calendar, Eighth Grade, 2017-2018 Unit 3 - Dystopian Book Clubs There is a lot of engagement, comprehension, talk and literary know-how tucked into this one unit. In order to accomplish it all, this unit is designed to be taught with four bends, each bend building on the work of its predecessor. Each bend contains a mix of read aloud, minilessons, independent reading, club talk and literary centers. We imagine that while students will daily read the texts they are discussing with their clubs, they only need to meet to talk with their clubs two to three times a week. We imagine that this unit will take approximately twenty sessions, with perhaps an additional day or two at the end for a celebration. Each bend will run roughly a week and a half and be made up of similar methods of instruction and student work opportunities. We can imagine most of the bends will begin with a read aloud—most likely from one of the anchor texts that will figure largely in the teaching of the unit. After the read aloud each week, if your time with your students is short, students might simply go off and apply some of what they learned during the read aloud to their independent reading. If the time is longer, students might have an opportunity to meet with and talk with their club members. Over the next three days, the workshop time will be launched by a quick minilesson giving explicit strategies students can apply right away to their dystopian and fantasy reading. Students will spend the bulk of their time reading, with some time set aside to have discussions with clubs. On the last day of each bend, the workshop could start with literary centers. These literary centers will be a way for students to learn about and work with the fascinating content of literary terms and traditions. It is a chance to offer more literary content in an engaging format, giving all students access to key concepts in small, rotating groups. Students will move through a different center each bend so that by the end of the unit they will have rotated through each one at least once. Each bend might look something like this: Day One Day Two Day Three Day Four Day Five · Read Aloud: · Minilesson · Minilesson · Minilesson · Literary Anchor text with · Students · Students · Students centers whole class independently independently independently (optional) conversation read their club read their club read their club · Students · Students texts texts texts independently independently · Students meet · If students were · Students meet read their club read their club with clubs able to meet with with clubs texts texts clubs on day one, · If time, students they might meet can meet with here and not days clubs 2 & 3 In the first bend, students will be immersing themselves, head first, into the genre, as they learn how to navigate the strange world of their dystopian stories.