School Improvement in Maryland

Using the State Curriculum: Reading/ELA, Grade 7

Reading/ELA | Informational | Literary | Writing | Language | Listening | Speaking

Advanced/Gifted and Talented: An advanced/gifted and talented tool is an idea for a complex, multi-step instructional task that requires students to apply knowledge and skills of multiple objectives that support one indicator. Tasks require students to interpret, analyze, and evaluate text at an appropriate level of complexity and embed a variety of differentiation strategies to challenge advanced readers. Many of these strategies and activities can be adapted for use with all students.

Standard 3.0 Comprehension of Literary Text

Indicator 2. Analyze text features to facilitate understanding of literary texts

Objective a. Analyze text features that contribute to meaning

Instructional Task
Students will analyze text features to facilitate their understanding of poetry. Students will assume the roles of literary editors and compile collections of poetry by a poet of choice. The students will also create a new poem imitating the style of the poet, particularly the poet's use of text features. The poetry collections can be used to create a poetry library for the class (authentic product).

Development of Task
  1. The teacher will provide students with collections of poetry of an appropriate level of complexity and facilitate students' selection of individual poets for study (choice).
  2. Students will select at least three poems by one poet to read and analyze for text features, such as quotation marks, exclamation points, hyphens, italics, illustrations, bold print, etc. Students will highlight any text features and explain how they contribute to the meaning of the poem. For example, italics may be used to draw attention to a word that might be integral to the meaning of the text or may suggest a different connotation of the word. Students should record their findings, specifying how each text feature helped facilitate understanding (Objective a).
  3. Students will analyze patterns in the use of text features that contribute to the poet's style (analysis). The students may write a poem imitating the style of the poet, emphasizing the use of text features (synthesis).
  4. The students will create poetry collections using text features to facilitate understanding the styles and themes of the poems. The teacher should provide the following guidelines for adding text features in the collection:

    Organizational aids

    1. Create a title and subtitle for the collection that reflects a central concept or theme in the poet's work.
    2. Create a title for the original poem in the poet's style.
    3. Use subheadings as applicable to imitate the poet's style.

    Graphic aids

    1. Add pictures and illustrations that contribute to the understanding of the poems.

    Informational aids

    1. Write footnotes to facilitate understanding of vocabulary or to add background information that contributes to the understanding of the poems.
    2. Write an introduction to the collection containing biographical information about the author, photographs, a discussion of the author's style, and an explanation of how the author uses text features in a unique way to contribute to meaning.
  5. Students may use Internet resources to find additional informational aids. Students may use word-processing and graphic design software to enhance the organizational aids, graphic aids, and print features (technology integration).
  6. The teacher will organize a literary seminar at which the student editors present their poetry collections and defend how their original poems effectively use text features to imitate the authors' styles (evaluation).
/instruction/advanced/reading/grade7/xml/3A2a.xml
Resources for Objective 3.A.2.a:
Lesson Seeds | Sample Assessments | ADVANCED/G-T |