Scope and Sequence — Middle School

No Fake Work.

Middle School Scope and Sequence

1211 Avery Street, Suite 201, Golden, CO 80403 • 817-269-9154 • www.inquirybydesign.com

No Fake Work.

Foundations for Inquiry• Introduction to

the Reading Life• Introduction to

the Writing Life• Introduction

to Interpretive Work, Grade Six

Reading Nonfiction Like a Detective

Dealing with Difficulty: Module #1 (grade 6)

How Poems are Built: A “Thinking with Literature” Study


Reading Roald Dahl: An Author Study

Cross-Grade Guidebooks• Constructing an Error Journal• Writing Text-Based Arguments

Scope and Sequence6th Grade

Reading Nonfiction Like a Detective asks students to con-struct a theory of reading like a detective to guide them through a set of experiments in reading nonfiction. This theory-building work is the culmination of a close study of Carl Hiassen’s Scat, a popular detective novel for adolescents. The remainder of the unit is dedicated to testing and refining this theory as students read, talk and write about a set of nonfiction texts.

How Poems are Built: A “Thinking with Literature” Study. In this unit of study, students will experience three cycles of interconnected work with poems by the following poets: Ko Un, Rita Dove, and William Carlos Williams. The work with the poems is specifically designed to contribute to a student’s apprenticeship to the close reading and text-based writing work described in the Common Core State Standards. The unit concludes with a retrospective task in which students consider what they have learned about poems as things people make or build.

CRoSS-GRADe GuIDeBookS

The Constructing an error Journal guidebook is a practical solution to the problem of engaging students in regular and frequent inquiries into their unique sentence-level errors. Through this inquiry-based approach to grammar and editing, students learn to identify, track, and solve the errors that mark their writing, largely with the help of their peers and a style manual.

The Writing Text-Based Arguments guidebook is specifically designed to address the new Common Core State Standards’ emphasis on written argument, a cornerstone of college and career readiness.

Foundations for Inquiry, Grade Six is comprised of three introductory studies designed to help establish the rituals, routines, and tools necessary for the inquiry-based English language arts classroom. Through the work in these studies, stu-dents will develop their own independent reading and writing lives. They will cultivate text-based reading, writing, and discus-sion skills through the Introduction to Interpretive Work module.

Dealing with Difficulty is a series of single-text modules conceived as part of Inquiry By Design’s efforts to ensure that secondary students have regular and supported opportunities to work with difficult texts. Each module at each grade level is an excursion into difficulty that is important in and of itself, but that is also valuable because it provides a basis for reflection and comparison in subsequent experiences with difficult texts.

Reading Roald Dahl: An Author Study. In this unit, stu-dents read and investigate a selection of work by the author of Boy, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Matilda, as well as lesser known short fiction including “The Man from the South” and “The Landlady.” Students’ close reading, writing, and discussion work culminates in retrospective tasks where they consider Dahl’s texts (and subtexts) and make arguments about what they think Dahl’s larger projects or arguments might be.


No Fake Work.

Foundations for Inquiry• Reading as

Problem Solving• Writers on

Writing: Advice and Publication in the Writing Life

• Introduction to Interpretive Work, Grade Seven

Creating Characters in Poetry: Martín espada and Luci Tapahanso (A Pair of Poets Study)


Investigative Report Writing: explanations and Arguments (A Reading Like a Detective Study)


Reading and Writing Fairy Tales



Creating Characters in Poetry: Martín espada and Luci Tapahanso (A Pair of Poets Study) focuses on a cluster of poems by two poets, and shows how poems are language events in which a poet works on an idea, makes arguments, and create a world or a character.

Investigative Report Writing: explanations and Arguments (A Reading Like a Detective Study). Students revisit theories of reading like a detective, and test and revise these theories through an exploration of selections from Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The unit’s capstone project is a writing project where students apply their “reading like a detective” skills to portrayals of food in popular culture and to people’s beliefs about food and eating.


The Constructing an error Journal guidebook is a practical solution to the problem of engag-ing students in regular and frequent inquiries into their unique sentence-level errors. Through this inquiry-based approach to grammar and editing, students learn to identify, track, and solve the errors that mark their writing, largely with the help of their peers and a style manual.


Foundations for Inquiry, Grade Seven is comprised of three introductory studies designed to help establish the rituals, routines, and tools necessary for the inquiry-based secondary English language arts classroom. These studies build upon the Grade Six “foundations” work and help students continue to develop their own independent reading and writing lives. The Introduction to Interpretive Work module, with its emphasis on reading, writing, and discussion, puts students on firm footing for the year’s text-based work.


Reading and Writing Fairy Tales asks students to explore claims made by child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim about the role fairy tales play in a child’s development through their own reading and re-writing of fairy tales. This study is anchored by a reading of Margaret Haddix’s Just Ella, a novel that re-imag-ines the classic Cinderella’s “happily ever after” ending.


No Fake Work.

Foundations for Inquiry• Vantage Points:

A Reading Life Study

• Studying Craft: Apprenticeship and Indepen-dent Writing

• Introduction to Interpretive Work, Grade Eight

Faces of the essay: An orientation to the Form


Little Puzzles: kay Ryan and emily Dickinson (A Pair of Poets Study)


Growing up: A Thinking with Literature Study



Faces of the essay: An orientation to the Form is built around a small collection of diverse touchstone essays. Students study these texts and then arrange them along a continuum as they learn to notice and describe the characteristics in each and across the set. In the culminating projects, students write essays of their own as they work to emulate the methods of the models.

Little Puzzles: kay Ryan and emily Dickinson (A Pair of Poets Study) The poems of Kay Ryan, the United States Poet Laureate from 2008–2010, have often been compared to the work of Emily Dickinson. In this unit, students explore poem sets by each poet through cycles of comprehension, interpretive, and “write like” work that are supplemented by investigations of the devices that mark Ryan and Dickinson’s poetry. In the culminating task, students consider Ryan’s and Dickinson’s work side-by-side as they work to explain similarities and differences in how each poet uses language to think on the page about the things that matter to them most.


The Constructing an error Journal guidebook is a practical solution to the problem of engaging students in regular and frequent inquiries into their unique sentence-level errors. Through this inquiry-based approach to grammar and editing, students learn to identify, track, and solve the errors that mark their writing, largely with the help of their peers and a style manual.


Foundations for Inquiry, Grade eight extends the work begun in previous reading and writing life studies through the introduction of author studies, independent writing projects, and a “writing like” point-of-view study designed to help students become better readers of sophisticated short fiction. The year’s text-based work is further reinforced through the reading, writ-ing, and discussion students practice through the Grade Eight Introduction to Interpretive Work module.


Growing up: A Thinking with Literature Study asks students to explore the theme of “growing up” using texts by four different writers: Alberto Alvaro Rios, bell hooks, Richard Wright, and lê thi diem thúy. Toward the end of the investiga-tion, students take on their own “little stories” projects and then study these in the same way they explored the unit’s touchstone texts—for the arguments and insights their fellow student writers make about growing up.


Documents

Scope and Sequence — Middle School