Skip to Main Content

Lesson 6

We will draft our response to the Section 1 Diagnostic: How do authors engage readers through setting, plot, and conflict?

Lesson Goals

Reading and Knowledge

  • Analyze Relationships: How well do I recognize and interpret important relationships among key details and ideas (characters, setting, tone, point of view, structure, development, etc.) within texts?
  • Compare and Connect: How well do I recognize points of connection among texts, textual elements, and perspectives to make logical, objective comparisons?
  • Gather and Organize Evidence: How well do I gather and organize relevant and sufficient evidence to demonstrate understanding of texts and topics, support claims, and develop ideas?

Writing

  • Form Claims: How well do I develop and clearly communicate meaningful and defensible claims that represent valid, evidence-based analysis?
  • Develop Ideas: How well do I use devices, techniques, descriptions, reasoning, evidence, and visual elements to support and elaborate on coherent and logical narratives, explanations, and arguments?
  • Use Conventions to Produce Clear Writing: How well do I apply correct and effective syntax, usage, mechanics, and spelling to communicate ideas and achieve intended purposes?

Texts

Core

  • Tradebook
    • The Book of Unknown Americans, Cristina Henríquez, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015
  • Unit Reader
    • “The Wanderers,” Guadalupe Nettel, Granta Publications, 2018

Materials

Tools

Reference Guides

Editable Google Docs

Activity 1: Write

We will begin our Section Diagnostic by comparing setting, plot, and conflict in a prewriting activity.

Step 1

Review the Section 1 Diagnostic Checklist. Ask your teacher clarifying questions as needed.

Step 2

Complete a Venn diagram comparing settings, plots, and conflicts in The Book of Unknown Americans and "The Wanderers." Use your notes from your Literary Elements and Narrative Techniques Note-Taking Tools for the novel and story.

Activity 2: Write

We will use a Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool to develop our responses to the Section Diagnostic.

Step 1

The Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool supports and guides a process for developing a claim from textual evidence; it can also help you explain how an existing claim is derived from, and supported by, evidence. Using the tool begins with a guiding question that calls for you to reach a conclusion and communicate a claim, which might be factual, analytical, comparative, or evaluative in nature. It helps you select the key details related to the question, explain how the details connect to your question and to other details, and through that analysis, move to a conclusion. The conclusion that you draw is the basis for your claim, which you try to communicate as clearly and directly as you can.

Step 2

Use the tool in the following way:

  1. Write down the Section Diagnostic’s guiding question in the space provided at the top.

  2. Use your Literary Elements and Narrative Techniques Note-Taking Tool to identify the most compelling evidence from the texts that help you respond to the question. Write down this information in the Attend to Details row. Do not forget to include page numbers. You might have to come back later to get exact quotes or more clarity.

  3. In the Analyze the Details row, you can show your thinking. Doing so can help you ensure there is a clear connection among the details you identified, your analysis, and the guiding question.

  4. The third row, Explain Connections, asks you to show your thinking about how the details connect to each other. Do the facts and information, taken together, lead to a conclusion? Are they details from a narrative that help you analyze a character? Are they indicators of an author’s perspective that you intend to support or refute?

  5. The final row asks you to form and express a claim. Look back over the tool and consider the guiding question, the details, and how they connect to each other. The conclusion you have drawn based on your analysis of the details in the previous rows should become your claim. Communicate that claim in a clear, direct sentence.

Activity 3: Write

We will write a first draft using information from our outlines.

Review your Vocabulary Journal. Identify a significant word or words that you would like to use in your response to the Section Diagnostic.

Review your Mentor Sentence Journal. Select a technique that you plan to use when writing your response to the Section Diagnostic

Using the notes on your Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool and your Literary Elements and Narrative Techniques Note-Taking Tool, draft a response to the Section 1 Diagnostic.