Students assess their mastery of standards, such as ability to determine a theme or central idea, by placing themselves on a diagram.	Students choose a character from the summer reading novel, assign character trails, and write about those traits as evidenced in the novel. Then, making a connection back to their claims, they support the importance of those characteristics and how they demonstrate authorial purpose and intent.	Students work in small groups to create a campaign platform for a character from Animal Farm. Students write a speech, create propaganda, perform roles suited to their strengths, and deliver their speech with artifacts to their peers.
Students gather text evidence to support various themes in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Groups work together to find appropriate evidence for each theme, so they must discuss and come to a consensus.	Students analyze how particular incidents propel character or plot and use text evidence to make inferences concerning characterization and plot.	Students work together to discuss and build summaries of their summer reading stories and articles. Then, they build summaries using the 5Ws strategy on their own. Working together in groups helps students to both comprehend their stories and to verbally determine the main points in both fiction and nonfiction texts.
This picture shows one student's annotations and highlighting for a section of the novel. The goal of this assignment is for students to practice annotation skills - a valuable skill for learning, comprehension and retention.	Students work together to complete DIDLS analysis on "The Man I Killed" - This activity is very helpful for students, as they learn an analysis strategy that can be used throughout their academic career.	During the course of the unit, students experience mini-lessons that allow them to explore non-fiction, while activating their prior knowledge. Teachers provide scaffolding as needed for student learning.
Students work collaboratively to communicate their ideas effectively; the students consider their audience and apply appropriate grammatical conventions in their writing.	Students annotate speech by using visual coding and commentary to relate the central theme of the speech to their summer reading.	The student demonstrates an understanding of the use of figurative and connotative meanings of text and cites strong textual evidence to support analysis. In addition, the student has connected the citations thematically.
Students engage with both the text and each other, as they give responses or take notes that focus on a variety of thematic and rhetorical strategies employed in the summer reading text.