My students need 30 copies of Into the Wild to participate in a summer reading assignment developing a foundational understanding of the concepts of Transcendentalism, a philosophy that pervades the American Literature canonical texts we study.
Meet my AP Language and Composition juniors! These 60 students are a driven, creative and clever group looking for new opportunities to challenge their thinking both in and outside of the classroom.
This group of students varies from voracious readers to those who have found challenges in keeping up with the dense canonical texts of an early American literature curriculum, and it is my goal to help them build a foundation of the concept with Transcendentalism with Into the Wild, a Modern, American text.
This text will go on to support their learning as we read Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
My Project
This project will allow students the opportunity to achieve a number of academic skills (from reading informational texts to text analysis to rhetorical analysis) and successfully bridge the gap between the American canon of literature we study over the course of the junior year and the modern style of nonfiction writing.
As part of our school's AP curriculum, students complete summer assignments to help keep their skills in practice, and over the course of the summer of 2018, the AP Language and Composition juniors hope to read Into the Wild.
In the past, students have been held accountable for finding their own copies of books, and this has made it difficult to create instructional units for the fall. With a class set of Into the Wild, my students will be able to read and analyze the text throughout the course of the summer and come back to school in the fall with a common text for discussion and rhetorical analysis. This will allow us to dig deeper and make greater connections to foundational texts on Transcendentalism from Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The film and documentary will allow students to make comparisons about purpose and occasion, providing each of them an opportunity to delve deeper into an understanding of how texts work and why it is important to study a text not only for its literary elements, but also for its unique style, structure, and message.
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