Alignment to Assessment Standards and Purpose of Lesson

• W.8.1a – Opening A: Students review the evidence collected on their Compare Text to Film note-catchers and locate the significant idea that they want to make the focus of their independent argument essays.
• RL.8.7 – Work Time A: Students plan their independent argument essays. As they evaluate the effectiveness of the film in conveying significant ideas of the text, students examine the extent to which the film departs from or stays faithful to the text.
• W.8.1 – Work Time A: Students plan argument essays to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence.
• W.8.4 – Work Time A: Students plan essays, aiming to produce clear and coherent writing that is appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
• W.8.1c – Closing and Assessment A: Students consider the words and phrases they use in their plans to create cohesion and clarify the relationships among claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.
• L.8.6 – Closing and Assessment A: Students accurately use grade-appropriate academic and domain-specific vocabulary in their plans for their essays.
• In this lesson, students focus on working to become effective learners by demonstrating perseverance as they plan their independent argument essays.

Opportunities to Extend Learning

• Identify students in class who are particularly good at different aspects of the writing process (e.g., developing counterclaims, using transition words, or incorporating academic language). Allow them to conference with their classmates to give advice on their area of expertise.

How It Builds on Previous Work

• In previous lessons, students analyzed a model literary argument essay and used their analysis to practice writing an argument essay with a classmate. In this lesson, students will use what they learned during the collaborative writing process to independently complete their evidence gathering and then plan their argument essays.

Support All Students

• Some students may feel nervous by the idea of writing an argument essay on their own. Remind them they have already written an argument essay in Module 2. Point out the similarities in structure between that essay and the collaborative essay of this module. Help students recognize that much of their thinking about the essay topic has already taken place as they gathered their evidence while reading and watching Farewell to Manzanar. Encourage them to shift their mental energy to differences in content, purpose, and audience between the two types of writing tasks.
• Remind students that the more they plan their essays now, the easier the Argument Essay task will be in the following lesson. It may be helpful for some students to have an opportunity to interact and discuss their ideas aloud before beginning to plan independently.
• Some students may find it more helpful to visually represent their ideas. Encourage these students to generate a mental map to depict the relationships across the content details of their essays. If a student creates a mental map instead of completing their writing planners, make sure they understand that all of the information from the planner must be represented in the map.
• Provide students with individual photocopies of anchor charts for use as they plan their essays. Encourage students to annotate their copies to help with processing and planning writing. ▲

Assessment Guidance

• Review students’ Argument Essay Writing Plan graphic organizers to ensure that students are developing coherent arguments with main claims supported by evidence and reasoning.
• As time allows, consider meeting with each student during the planning time for a 1-minute conference to monitor understanding and offer support.

Down the Road

• In Unit 3, students will read more supplemental texts about Japanese American internment, eventually extracting from them overarching lessons learned from this dark time in history. These lessons will inform student work on the performance task in the second half of Unit 3.