In the first unit, students will explore the skills and features of storytelling in narratives focusing on a change. The unit assessments include writing a personal narrative and a short story. 

Throughout the unit, students engage in activities in which they use strategies such as QHT, close reading, marking the text, and adding to practice the important skills of close reading, analyzing narrative elements, and writing real or imagined narratives. Students analyze and discuss a variety of texts such as “Pandora and the Whispering Box,” a myth from Ancient Greece, as well as Langston Hughes’s short story “Thank You, M’am.” Throughout the unit, discussion, brainstorming, and drafting are promoted as ways to develop ideas about and for narratives.  

Students’ vocabulary study concentrates on academic vocabulary such as sequence, cause-effect, and transitions, and vocabulary specific to literary study such as simile, denotation, and point of view.