Alignment to Assessment Standards and Purpose of Lesson

• L.6.5 – Opening A: Students complete an entrance ticket in which they identify examples of figurative language in chapter 4 of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and explain how these examples contribute to the development of the story.
• L.6.5 – Work Time A: Students participate in a Language Dive that invites them to interpret the authors’ use of personification in a sentence from chapter 4 of the text.
• RI.6.1 – Work Time B: Students participate in a close read of an informational text called “William Kamkwamba’s Electric Wind,” using textual evidence to support their understanding of the text.
• RI.6.2 – Work Time B: Students identify the central idea of “William Kamkwamba’s Electric Wind” by examining key details.
• RI.6.4 – Work Time B: During the close read, students determine the technical,
• connotative, and figurative meanings of words as they are used in an informational text.
• L.6.4 – Work Time B: During the close read, students use a range of strategies to interpret unfamiliar vocabulary in an informational text.
• RI.6.3 – Closing and Assessment A: Students collaborate with classmates to add to their Analyze Key Individual note-catchers.
• In this lesson, students focus on working to become effective learners by collaborating as they work in triads during the close read.

Opportunities to Extend Learning

• There are many engaging ways to practice playing with word connotation. For example, students could be given paint cards from a hardware store and fill them in with varying “shades” of a word (e.g., “happy,” “joyful,” and “elated” show varying degrees of an emotion). Invite students to think of scenarios in which a word with a stronger connotation would better communicate a point.
• Consider using a speech given at an important historical event (e.g., Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech), and guide students to annotate the speech for words with particularly strong connotation. Explain how the authors deliberately chose words with specific connotations to communicate their feelings about the event.
• The close read in this lesson guides students to identify a central idea. The Grade 7 standard requires students to determine more than one central idea, so to extend learning encourage students to identify more than one central idea in the text excerpt. Also, encourage students to identify one or more central ideas in additional texts on the topic, for examples texts at a higher Lexile® listed in Recommended Texts and Other Resources.

How It Builds on Previous Work

• Students completed the Mid-Unit 1 Assessment in the previous lesson for which they identified the central idea of a text and key details to support that idea. The second half of this unit builds on those skills and continues practicing summary writing which was first introduced in Module 1.
• In this lesson, students transfer those skills to a new informational text.

Support All Students

• The drought and famine are first described in chapter 4 and remain a major theme throughout the first half of the novel. Descriptions of the famine may be upsetting to some students, especially those who come from environments with limited food security. Allow students to express and process their feelings about the suffering described in the book.
• The close read and Language Dive of this lesson are intended to facilitate "pauses" that allow readers to dig more deeply into the meaning of a chapter or sentence. These activities are critical for the development of ELLs’ reading and linguistic skills. To help students begin to connect the strategies of the close read and Language Dive to their own independent reading, debrief by encouraging students to identify new reading strategies they learned. ▲
• Students may need additional support with recording their answers on their note-catchers. Group those students for additional support when necessary. ▲

Assessment Guidance

• Review students’ Language Dive note-catchers to ensure students understand several ways to analyze and interpret figurative language.
• Review students’ Close Read note-catchers to ensure students understand different strategies for determining the technical, figurative, and connotative meanings of new vocabulary.

Down the Road

• In the next lesson, students will continue in the anchor text reading the first half of chapter 5. They will be introduced to the Structure anchor chart and begin analyzing how a particular sentence contributes to the structure of the text and helps to convey the central idea.
• Plan also to launch the Independent Research Reading task in the next lesson.