Unit Plan
Tuck Everlasting
EEX 4070
Erin Pollack and Pamela Taveras
University of South Florida
October 2007
Brief overview of the unit
Our thematic unit plan focuses primarily on progressing student reading skills through the introduction of pre, during, and post reading strategies. Another key point of the unit is to help students recognize the important parts of a story. Day one focuses on pre-reading strategies. Students participate in activities that allow them to make predictions about the text. Individual and group worksheets help students organize their ideas. The activities also serve as a means of informal assessment to measure students’ prior knowledge.
Day two is about getting students familiar with the story’s setting. Visualization activities and semantic maps help students to recognize what parts of a text refer to the story’s setting. The setting is the first thing introduced in the book, so it will be the first thing students learn to recognize. This day focuses on during reading strategies.
Day three links real world processes to the fictional text. Students explore life cycles, including their own, in order to recognize the difference between our cycle of life and the Tuck family’s. Students complete handouts that clearly break down each cycle. Students also participate in a fun TPR activity that allows them to physically portray an animal life cycle.
Day four is about getting students acquainted with the main characters of the story. Students participate in activities that allow them to dissect given characters on a physical and emotional basis. Students take into account the appearance and feelings of the characters. Afterwards, students are introduced to a strategy that allows them to keep track of main characters while reading the text. Students then end the day with another prediction exercise through a KWL chart.
Day five is a day for review and for mixing in new material. Students learn about story soup and all the ingredients that should be included. Students participate in individualized activities that they get to chose focusing on setting, characters, and the plot. By keeping graphic organizers, students have all their handouts and materials at their fingertips in one binder. Each student’s binder is created specifically with that student in mind. The format of handouts and content are adapted to fit that student’s needs.
Unit Goals and Objectives
Objectives for this Unit:
§ Given Differentiated Instruction students will be able to experience maximum learning and growth.
§ Given pre-reading strategies students will connect their previous knowledge with the course content and form opinions about the ideas presented.
§ Given appropriate reading strategies, text, and technology students will be able to gain considerable understanding of the story’s content.
§ Given appropriate scaffolding, graphic organizers, and during reading strategies students will be able to recognize life cycles across content.
§ Given graphic organizers and guided instruction students will be able to identify the important parts of the story.
§ Given graphic organizer and cooperative grouping students will be able to analyze the story’s characters and events.
Goals for this Unit:
§ Students will demonstrate observable and measurable improvements in reading.
§ Students will actively reference their previous knowledge while reading in order to build on current schemes.
§ Students apply reading strategies to accurately identify a story’s setting and describe it’s characters.
§ Students apply and manipulate these reading strategies to maximize reading comprehension.
§ Students will use technology as a learning tool
§ Students will apply knowledge of the life cycle in other classes.
§ Students will study the life cycles presented in the text and their relevance in the real world.
§ Students will learn how to identify a story’s parts.
§ Student will work together to analyze the story’s characters and events.
Prior knowledge and skills
Based on the content of our unit, and the Sunshine State Standards for grades 3-5, students should have experience with the following knowledge and skills.
- Ability to construct meaning from a text: the main idea of each chapter, how to retell an event in simple context, recognize the difference between fact and opinion, and understands the concept of comparing and contrasting.
- Use prior knowledge to generate questions about the text.
- Can establish the main purpose for reading
- Can see a difference between fiction and non-fiction.
- Can develop vocabulary by listening to, reading, and discussing familiar selections.
- Knows how to use references such as a dictionary.
- Knows how to summarize a selection.
- Has participated in group activities.
- Can identify the author’s purpose in a simple text.
- Can distinguish between informal and persuasive texts.
- Is aware of his/her personal preferences in a text.
- Can organize information (maps, graphs, charts)
- Understands the concept of cause and effect
- Can identify a simple sequence of events
- Can use preparation strategies (brainstorm, making lists, outlining, making graphic organizers.)
- Can demonstrate a sense of completeness in writing
- Can interact with peers in a variety of situations
- Can make inferences and draw conclusions regarding story elements
- Has experience with using computers (Microsoft office), and navigating on the internet.
Rational for Instructional Strategies
Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt is a folktale that depicts a young girl’s journey to self-discovery. Through this book, students gain awareness of personal opinions, values, and beliefs. The central ideas presented in the text are immortality, friendship, family, self-identity, choices, and consequences. Babbitt’s use of accessible language, detailed setting, interesting characters, and simple plot make this book a good match four our students. This unit’s focus is middle school literature and reading skills. It allows students to learn Reading Strategies, Critical Thinking, and Character Analysis.
The focus of each day’s lessons is on reading strategies and comprehension. The five strands of literature (Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking, and Viewing) are used in each day’s lesson. The use of pre-during and post reading strategies such as predicting, visualization, KWL, and character charts help our students become effective, active readers. Using explicit instruction, we model and provide guided practice and independent application of each reading skill and strategy. These skills benefit all learners in our classroom as they challenge and advance each student to a higher ability levels. Some of Hector and Frank’s learning needs are directly met through these reading lessons as well.
Differentiated instruction allows us to create a curriculum that can meet all of our student’s learning needs. Tiered activities, flexible grouping, and choice boards are the teaching strategies we use in order to achieve maximum learning and multilevel instruction. Tiered activities similar to the one used in day four allow us to teach all students the same concept at their own ability level. (Frank, Jennifer, Bobby, and Tia benefit from our modeling and tiered lessons.)
Flexible grouping facilitates instruction by allowing us to teach mixed ability students as a whole class, then divide them into temporary groups according to their need and give them the time, support, and mastery skills they need. It also allows students to interact with many classmates and contribute to their learning. This interaction is a class building activity that helps create a positive learning environment. All students in our class benefit from participating in cooperative learning groups because they allow students to develop social skills, cultural awareness, and critical thinking. But, students like Julie, Nicole and Edward are able to build friendships and to practice appropriate social behavior.
The specific grouping strategies we use throughout this unit are grouping by student’s interest, readiness levels and learning styles. When creating our guided practice or independent application activities, we considered student readiness levels and created mixed ability groups for time management, student focus, skill mastery, and collaboration. In other words in some cases, we grouped students together who are at similar readiness levels (in order to target them), and in other cases we intentionally grouped students with different readiness levels in the same group in order to expose them to other perspectives.
The teaching approaches we use are parallel teaching and alternative teaching. Parallel teaching lets us provide more individualized instruction to all students. And Alternative teaching lets us support the whole class as we work with a targeted group of students on specific needs while the rest of the class works on the day’s content.
Overall differentiated instruction allows students to progress up to their next ability level.
Strategies and activities like exit cards, think-tack-toe boards, journal prompts, 321 activities, and specifically graphic organizers are ways to adapt the content, the process, or the product to suit the student’s needs.
Class Description
Our 6th grade Language Arts class contains 24 students. The students range from below average to average ability. The class is being taught by two professionals, 1) a mainstream language arts teacher and 2) a special educator who share equal roles in instruction. Our mixed ability class consists of the following learners. We have John, who is a gifted learner and excels in verbal skills and needs instruction in a challenging and positive environment. We also have Analise, who is a student with a speech impairment who has trouble with articulation, and tends to stutter. She needs an avenue that will allow her to openly express herself without feeling uncomfortable and provide opportunities to socialize with her peers. Michael, our student with ADHD and a 504 Plan needs help with organization skills and pacing through his activities. Self-regulation and close monitoring will meet his organization and focus needs. Tia, our LEP student at the pre-production level is a recent immigrant from the Philippines, and is very shy and withdrawn. She needs help in developing appropriate social skills, but particularly with developing language skills. Bobby, our LEP student at the speech emergence level needs to be involved in activities that will foster his speech and comprehension.
The two students with a behavior disorder, Edward and Nicole require kinesthetic learning activities that promote socialization. These students need assistance setting personal goals in and out of the classroom. Julie, although she has not been diagnosed with a emotional or behavioral disorder, has a living situation that can create similar barriers for her learning. She also needs plenty of interaction with her classmates in a safe classroom environment. Her strengths need to be highlighted and her confidence needs to be boosted. Jennifer, our student with Down’s syndrome has an IQ of 53 which puts her in the category of mild mental retardation. She needs to participate in stimulating learning activities that reflect her level of comprehension. Hector, a student in our class who has a learning disability in reading, needs activities that teach him pre-during-post reading strategies.
We have three students who are performing below grade level: Frank (significantly below in all subjects), Sue, and Billy. These students need instruction that is engaging, challenging, and includes clear directions. These students also need a variety of supplementary resources that aid them in strengthening their basic learning skills. The remaining students are all performing at grade level. Their learning needs are just as diverse and important as their peers’. All of the students need a curriculum that caters to their learning styles, interests, and ability level. All of our students come from differing backgrounds and living situations. Overall, instruction in this unit will be differentiated in order to accommodate each child’s needs.