Alignment to Assessment Standards and Purpose of Lesson

• Repeated routines occur in the following:
• W.7.4 – Opening A and B: In the entrance ticket activity, students consider the ways they can add elements to their stories that will appeal to third-grade elementary school students.
• Opening B: Students review the learning target.
• Closing and Assessment A: Students engage in a collaborative discussion to reflect on habits of character and academic mindsets.
• New skills are introduced in the following:
• Work Time A: Students draw on their Narrative Writing Plan graphic organizers and the evidence they’ve collected throughout the module from A Long Walk to Water and related texts to draft a narrative that showcases the habits of character that a Lost Boy or Girl of Sudan demonstrated in his or her journey. (W.7.3, W.7.4, W.7.6, W.7.10)
• The Think-Pair-Share protocol is used in this lesson. Protocols are an important feature of our curriculum because they are one of the best ways we know to engage students in discussion, inquiry, critical thinking, and sophisticated communication. A protocol consists of agreed-upon, detailed guidelines for reading, recording, discussing, or reporting that ensure equal participation and accountability in learning.

Opportunities to Extend Learning

• Encourage those students who finish the assessment early to begin tracking their progress and revising or adding to their essays to meet their narrative writing goals.

How It Builds on Previous Work

• In Units 1 and 2, students closely examined A Long Walk to Water and informational texts related to the history and context of the events in the novel. Over the past several lessons, students have been planning a narrative to demonstrate their understanding of the events and characters of the people involved in these stories and to transform the material into stories that they can share with others.

Support All Students

• If students receive accommodations for assessments, communicate with the cooperating service providers regarding the practices of instruction in use during this study as well as the goals of the assessment.
• Some students may require more than the time allotted to complete the assessment. ▲
• Continue to monitor students to determine if there are issues surfacing as a result of the content of this lesson that need to be discussed as a whole group, in smaller groups, or individually.
• If technology is not available or a barrier for students, they can handwrite their narrative. However, if possible, students should type their narratives into a word-processing program.

Assessment Guidance

• Assessment materials (student copy, answer key) are included in the Assessment download on this page. For an exemplar, consult the text Brothers in Hope by Mary Williams.
• When providing feedback to students on this assessment, use the Narrative Writing rubric (see Tools Page to download the Writing Rubrics document) in order to complete the student Track Progress recording form. Consider making notes in the appropriate column for each criterion in a different color than student responses. There is also space provided to respond to student comments.
• In this assessment, students are tracking progress toward anchor standard:
• W.3: By the end of Grade 12 I will be able to: Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.

Down the Road

• In the next lesson, students will begin their performance task in which they transfer their narrative into an ebook format and write an author’s note explaining the habits of character on display in their narratives.