Making the Common Core fit with pre-CCSS curriculum: Literature

Making the CCSS fit with seriously outdated curriculum can be incredibly challenging!  I read a lot, follow teacher blogs, and get great ideas from fantastic educators on Pinterest.  My district has fully embraced the CCSS and has provided a lot of professional development opportunities.  My principal has also provided us with PD hours to do book studies using books that are fresh and current in education. Having said that though, our ELA curriculum is 14 years old.  Yikes!!! There are some great stories in there, but... It takes some time to create lessons using the CCSS.  

I mostly teach novels, but sometimes I use our old Open Court anthology selections.  Two weeks ago I used Love as Strong as Ginger.  It's a cute story about a girl who spends Saturdays with her Grandmother.  There is a LOT of figurative language!!  I made flip books for figurative language notes which were glued into our ELA journals. I printed out two poems by William Carlos Williams to use to introduce the topics of mood, tone, and imagery.  We read only two-three pages each day and practiced close-reading strategies, using ou journals to take notes. It was a smash hit with the students.  To have them so excited about an anthology story is rather rare!  

We highlighted words that helped us with tone, mood, and imagery.  Then we drew what image came to mind.  
















 I really wanted the students to feel comfortable using words like tone, mood, and imagery.  I provided sentence frames for the students to glue into their journals in addition to the 8.5x11 size I put up on the wall. We used them over and over and over that week.  As part of the frame, I had them citing evidence each and every time they made a claim about any of those literary elements.  I hear "I know this because..." a lot now, no matter what we are reading.

The students were able to pick out a lot of figurative language on their own.  They were like language detectives!  

We hit four standards with one story.  I did not teach it the "Open Court" way, but planned my lessons the "CCSS" way and used an Open Court story.  

Key Ideas and Details

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.1 Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text, including how characters in a story or drama respond to challenges or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic; summarize the text.

Craft and Structure

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative language such as metaphors and similes.

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.7 Analyze how visual and multimedia elements contribute to the meaning, tone, or beauty of a text (e.g., graphic novel, multimedia presentation of fiction, folktale, myth, poem).