Alignment to Assessment Standards and Purpose of Lesson

• RI.6.1 – Work Time A: Students participate in a collaborative Annotating Text protocol with the Team Moon text, identifying textual evidence that supports their analysis of the text.
• RI.6.6 – Work Time A: During the Annotating Text protocol, students annotate Team Moon to determine the author’s point of view.
• RI.6.1 – Work Time B: Students participate in a Language Dive using a sentence from Team Moon. They use textual evidence to answer questions about the sentence and the text.
• RI.6.4 – Work Time B: During the Language Dive, students determine the connotative meanings of words as they are used in the text.
• RI.6.6 – Work Time B: During the Language Dive, students analyze how words with specific connotations can convey the author’s point of view toward the Apollo 11 mission in Team Moon.
• L.6.4 – Work Time B: During the Language Dive, students use vocabulary strategies to determine the meanings of unfamiliar words in Team Moon.
• L.6.5 – Work Time B: During the Language Dive, students differentiate among words with similar denotations but distinct connotations.
• RI.6.6 – Closing and Assessment A: Students complete an exit ticket in which they read a quote by astronaut Michael Collins and determine his point of view toward the political leaders of the world.
• RI.6.8 – Closing and Assessment A: As part of the exit ticket, students identify a claim that Collins is making in his quote.

Opportunities to Extend Learning

• Point out astronaut Michael Collins’s use of parallelism, similar phrases or clauses that have the same grammatical structure, in the quote from the exit ticket (“blue and white,” “capitalist or Communist,” “rich or poor,” and “envious or envied”). Ask students to discuss how the use of parallelism enhances the sentence. Challenge students to identify other techniques the author employs, such as alliteration.
• During Work Time A, students read Text: Team Moon Excerpt and learn more about the events leading up to the Apollo 11 moon landing. Invite students who are especially interested in space travel to explore the official Apollo 11 flight journal, which has transcripts and audio to show the communications between the flight crew and the Mission Control Center (http://eled.org/0251).
• Before distributing the Language Dive: Team Moon, Paragraph 4 Sentence Chunk Chart in Work Time B, challenge students to select sentences from the text that they believe are worthy of a closer look through a Language Dive. Tell them that the purpose of this Language Dive is to help them better understand the way in which the author uses vocabulary to convey her point of view. In pairs, students can select an appropriate sentence and develop a series of two or three questions related to point of view in that sentence. Students can then compare their chosen sentence and questions to those of the Language Dive: Team Moon, Paragraph 4 Sentence Chunk Chart. This task will exercise students’ understanding of an author’s point of view and how it is conveyed in a text, as well as increase students’ ownership of Language Dives.

How It Builds on Previous Work

• In previous lessons, students have been building background knowledge about the Space Race. First, students read about the context in which the Space Race began, noting its goals and political undertones. Then, students read more about the particular astronauts involved in Apollo 11, which led to the first human being sent to the moon. This lesson adds to students’ understanding of the timeline by featuring a text that describes the final events before the Apollo 11 launch. Students engage with the text using a variation of the Annotating Text protocol, first used in a previous lesson. This lesson also continues to develop students’ abilities to identify the ways an author uses words with specific connotations to express her point of view.

Support All Students

• Note that there is a differentiated version of Text: Team Moon Excerpt used in Work Time A in the separate Teacher’s Guide for English Language Learners. ▲
• This lesson features a collaborative version of the Annotating Text protocol, in which multiple students work together to annotate the same text. The collaboration built into this iteration of the protocol gives learners the opportunity to borrow from and build upon the thinking of others. Both peers and instructors can provide feedback to call attention to additional key ideas and details.
• Students may notice during Closing and Assessment A that the last sentence in the quote from Michael Collins sounds repetitive. Remind students that, in the previous module, they focused on writing sentences with a variety of structures and vocabulary. Point out that although this sentence uses a lot of repetition, it does so deliberately and effectively.

Assessment Guidance

• For homework in the previous lesson, students read about several Apollo missions and continued filling in a timeline to track the background knowledge they are building about the Space Race. During Opening A of this lesson, review the additions students made for homework in the previous lesson, but do not collect the timeline, as students will add to it for homework after this lesson.
• Remind students that Unit 1 of this module is focused on building background knowledge about the Space Race to set the context for the anchor text, Hidden Figures. The many informational texts they read in this unit are intended to highlight the remarkable achievements of this time period and to make clear the people and perspectives that have been left out of these traditional narratives of events.
• Students may not, at first, understand the structure of Text: Team Moon Excerpt. Explain that the subheadings separate the three main chunks of the text, each focused on a different aspect of the preparation for the Apollo 11 mission. Students may prefer to add annotations in different colors, one color for each section of the text, to highlight the changing focus of each section and distinguish different sets of notes.
• As students determine the author’s purpose and point of view in Text: Team Moon Excerpt, push them to identify the words and phrases that convey both, as well as their connotations.

Down the Road

• In the next lesson, students will complete the mid-unit assessment. The mid-unit assessment features a text that describes the culmination of the Space Race: the successful Apollo 11 mission and human beings’ first steps on the moon. The selected and constructed responses on the mid-unit assessment will feature selected response questions about central idea, vocabulary in context, and the author’s point of view and how it’s conveyed in the text.