Common Core Standards
Grade 8
Reading RI.8.3
Analyze how a text makes connections among and distinctions between individuals, ideas, or events (e.g., through comparisons, analogies, or categories).
Martin Luther King, Jr. was known to have modeled his civil rights movement after the nonviolence of Mahatma Gandhi. Those are the kinds of comparisons students will be expected to be able to make in order to fulfill this Common Core Standard. They will also have to be able to point out what it means if something was "as horrific as the trenches of World War I" or what it means for a person to be a fascist or a Jackson Democrat. This standard basically asks students to take the knowledge they already know about non-literature stuff and apply it to different non-literature stuff.
Example 1
Have students use CNN's Freedom Project to conduct research of modern day slavery. They should gather 10 facts and create a PSA to help stop slavery.
Aligned Resources
- Teaching American Born Chinese: Are You There, God? It's Me, Monkey King
- Teaching Maniac Magee: City Divided
- Teaching Maniac Magee: Exploring Homelessness
- Teaching Murder on the Orient Express: Deadly Motives
- Teaching Farewell to Manzanar: "What else should I be? All apologies." (Nirvana)
- Teaching The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963: Let's Do the Time Warp
- Teaching Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Integration In Our Nation
- Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird: A Dream Deferred
- Teaching Hatchet: Biology 101
- Teaching A Wrinkle in Time: Right Brain Versus Left Brain
- Teaching The View from Saturday: Getting To Know a Turtle (Almost)
- Teaching Dead End in Norvelt: What Would the Communists Do?
- Teaching Dead End in Norvelt: Learning from Our Past
- Teaching The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: Sailing Around the World