Finding Freedom: ELA Lessons for Gifted and Advanced Learners in Grades 6-8
About this ebook
To sharpen historical thinking, students analyze arguments for freedom, examine dissenting perspectives, and reason through multiple viewpoints of historical issues through debates and interactive activities. To develop advanced literacy skills, students evaluate effective rhetorical appeals, claims, supporting evidence, and techniques that advance arguments. Students synthesize their learning by comparing speeches to each other, relating texts to contemporary issues of today, and making interdisciplinary connections. Lessons include close readings with text-dependent questions, choice-based differentiated products, rubrics, formative assessments, social studies content connections, and ELA tasks that require argument and explanatory writing.
Ideal for pre-AP and honors courses, the unit features speeches from Patrick Henry, Frederick Douglass, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lincoln, Kennedy, Johnson, George W. Bush, Obama, and others.
Grades 6-8
About the author
Emily Mofield, Ed.D., is a consulting teacher for gifted education in Sumner County, TN. She is a Nationally Board Certified Teacher in language arts and has taught gifted language arts classes for 10 years.
Tamra Stambaugh, Ph.D., is the Director of Programs for Talented Youth at Vanderbilt University. She is the coauthor (with Dr. Joyce VanTassel-Baska) of Comprehensive Curriculum for Gifted Learners, Overlooked Gems: A National Perspective on Low-Income Promising Students, and the Jacob's Ladder Reading Comprehension Program.
