Freshmen Academic Essays

Performance Indicators:

P.S ELA-2 Reading Analysis: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

A. Evaluate the relevant themes and synthesize how they are present in the novel in oral and written responses.
B. Interpret the implications of setting and circumstance.
C. Analyze the role of characters in the plot in oral and written responses.
D. Analyze important quotations from the text in oral and written responses.
E. Annotate the text.

P.S ELA-3 Reading Craft and Structure: Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text in which the rhetoric is particularly effective, analyzing how style and content contribute to the power, persuasiveness or beauty of a text.

A. Understand SOAPSTone: Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject, Tone
B. Analyze the plot and/or design of the text, following shifts in time and place.

  1.  On Writing by Stephen King

2.  How Long, Not Long by Martin Luther King Jr.

3.  Laugh, Kookaburra by David Sedaris

4.   Paul Graham – How To Do What You Love

5.  A Mickey Mantle Koan by David James Duncan 

6.  Death of a Moth  by Virginia Wolf

7.  George Orwell – A Hanging

8.    Sending Grandma to the Ovens by Colin Cohen

9.  Once More to the Lake by E.B. White

10. What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About by Michele Filgate