Stories we read in this unit may include...

• “The Landlady”
• “The Necklace”
• “The Ingredients”

• “When I Lay My Burden Down”

• Excerpt from Glass Castle
• “Rules of the Game” 
• “Triangle”
• “Sol Painting Inc”
• New York Day Women
• “A Smart Cookie” (2 pages)
• “A Sound of Thunder”
• “The Sniper” 
• Assessment: “The Interlopers”

Night is a 1960 book by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, at the height of the Holocaust toward the end of the Second World War

This is a week-long film study of Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit

In this unit, students will be reading on the following texts: 

-Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys

-Book Thief by Markus Zusak

-Code Talkers by Joseph Bruchac

-Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown 

The title tells it like it is. Sherman Alexie was born a Spokane Indian. He grew up where the book is set, on a reservation - the "rez" - in Wellpinit, Washington state. He was, like his central character, hydrocephalic at birth, "with too much grease inside my skull". And in his teens he attended Reardan High School, off the reservation, near the rich farm town, where all the other students were white. Many authors hum and ha when asked if their fiction is in any way autobiographical. This one makes no bones about it and yet skillfully manages to transform his actual experience into a novel. True fiction. Absolutely.

All work in this unit will center around Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary. We will read related nonfiction pieces and poetry 

They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation.

Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him. (From Amazon Listing) 

We read through the entire script and see clips from the following film adaptations: 

Zeffirelli 1968

Lehrman 1996

Carlei 2014

Gnomeo and Juliet 

Broadway production 2014

Royal Shakeseare Company production