top of page

UNIT 1: YE OLDE USA

Unit Overview

What does it mean to be free?  Is America truly the “land of the free”?

 

In our first unit, we'll be traveling back in time to the start of our nation and the Revolutionary War. We'll start with reviewing literary devices such as plot, conflict, and character types as we start our historical fiction novel. We'll also be reading several nonfiction historical texts and poems to learn more about tyranny, revolutions, slavery, and freedom. This is a writing focused unit, so we'll be reviewing the Write Tools writing routine, summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, and sharpening our research skills. Our end of the unit performance task will be a research paper explaining a modern day form of oppression. Students will drive their own research, find credible internet sources, and use MLA 8 formatting to draft their five paragraph research essays. 

Reading & Writing Skills

  • Literary Devices

  • Nonfiction Text Structures

  • Research Skills

    • Website validity

    • Summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting

    • Quotations and citations (MLA 8)

  • Writing an expository research paper

UNIT 1 TEXTS

As the Revolutionary War begins, thirteen-year-old Isabel wages her own fight...for freedom. Promised freedom upon the death of their owner, she and her sister, Ruth, in a cruel twist of fate become the property of a malicious New York City couple, the Locktons, who have no sympathy for the American Revolution and even less for Ruth and Isabel. When Isabel meets Curzon, a slave with ties to the Patriots, he encourages her to spy on her owners, who know details of British plans for invasion. She is reluctant at first, but when the unthinkable happens to Ruth, Isabel realizes her loyalty is available to the bidder who can provide her with freedom. 

From acclaimed author Laurie Halse Anderson comes this compelling, impeccably researched novel that shows the lengths we can go to cast off our chains, both physical and spiritual. (Source)

A Young People's History of the United States brings to US history the viewpoints of workers, slaves, immigrants, women, Native Americans, and others whose stories, and their impact, are rarely included in books for young people. 

 

Beginning with a look at Christopher Columbus’s arrival through the eyes of the Arawak Indians, then leading the reader through the struggles for workers’ rights, women’s rights, and civil rights during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Zinn in the volumes of A Young People’s History of the United States presents a radical new way of understanding America’s history. In so doing, he reminds readers that America’s true greatness is shaped by our dissident voices. (Source)

Language Skills

  • Proofreading Marks

  • Homophones

  • Nouns & Verbs

  • Capitalization

  • Pronoun Problems

  • Types of Verbs

  • Verbals

  • Verb Phrases

bottom of page