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Tuesday, December 11, 2012

New Common Core Reading Standards Mark The End Of Literature | toteachornototeach

New Common Core Reading Standards Mark The End Of Literature | toteachornototeach:


New Common Core Reading Standards Mark The End Of Literature

Common Core Nonfiction Reading Standards
Mark The End Of Literature, English Teachers Say
BookBurn


Concern is growing among teachers and parents that literary classics will go the way of the dinosaurs under a set of new national curricular standards.
The Common Core State Standards, academic benchmarks that have been adopted by 46 states, call for 12th grade reading to be 70 percent nonfiction, or “informational texts” — gradually stepping up from the 50 percent nonfiction reading required of elementary school students.
The Common Core standards focus on teaching fewer subjects in greater depth, replacing a melange of educational expectations that vary wildly across districts and states. Proponents of the standards, like the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, say too many students are not



New Common Core Unit Plan On Persuasive Writing

Stanford’s Understanding Language has produced a free five-lesson unit plan for English Language Learners on persuasive writing called Persuasion Across Time and Space: Analyzing and Producing Persuasive Texts.
I only quickly reviewed it, and it seems to have some nice materials and activities. They say it’s for an intermediate ELL level middle school class. It seems fairly high level in terms of the language and intellectual requirements, so I’d suggest it would work well if you had a class composed entirely of high intermediates. If you had a wide range of language levels, though, I’d question how realistic it would be to realistically differentiate the