English Language Arts Grades 7-8 (2023)
Lesson Plans

Speaking and Listening (7-8.SL)

Students will learn to collaborate, express and listen to ideas, integrate and evaluate information from various sources, use media and visual displays as well as language and grammar strategically to help achieve communicative purposes, and adapt to context and task.

Standard 7-8.SL.2:

Evaluate the credibility of multiple sources of information presented in various formats and media to make informed decisions.

• A Long Walk To Water Connection Experience
  In this co-taught 80-minute face-to-face lesson (assessment is homework or given time in a second class session) students will rotate through stations to make personal connections with the book, A Long Walk to Water by  Linda Sue Park. (Stations can be removed or customized to allow for time, budget, or supervision constraints.) Please note, this lesson works best when you have several adult volunteers to run stations. This lesson is best co-taught with an ELA teacher who will be reading and discussing the book with their students. (It can be slightly adapted to fit similar stories.) It is also an effective way to deepen understanding and connections after the class has read the book. Thumbnail Image: Woodwayne, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
• American Authors in the Nineteenth Century: Whitman, Dickinson, Longfellow, Stowe, and Poe
  This primary source set includes documents and images from the lives of American authors in the 19th century. A teacher guide is included to assist educators in utilizing the primary sources in their instruction.
• BBC My World Media Literacy
  My World Media Literacy, developed in partnership by BBC Learning, BBC World Services, and Microsoft, is a free educational platform for students ages 11-14 designed with the goal of increasing global media literacy and the evaluation of information presented in modern journalism. Featuring ten 45-minute lesson plans, each with activities and a companion video, these 21st century resources increase students? critical thinking skills needed to be responsible consumers of news while inspiring them to become citizen journalists in order to navigate the news and form their own opinions.
• Evaluate Credibility of Online Sources
  Need your students to do some research and want to make sure that they know how to find credible sources? There is the perfect Google for Education Applied Digital Skills Lesson for that!  Thumbnail Photo Credits: "Keyboard and Encyclopedia" by brad.rourke is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ 
• Lesson 3: A Debate Against Slavery
  Sometimes, people will fight to keep someone else from being treated poorly. Disagreement over slavery was central to the conflict between the North and the South. The nation was deeply divided.
• Listening Guide: Chatbots are supercharging search: Are we ready?
  Our guest on this episode is Will Knight, senior writer about artificial intelligence at Wired magazine. We discuss how ChatGPT is being applied to search and what some of the potential and pitfalls are of this new class of technology known as ?generative AI.?
• Listening Guide: Flagrant foul: Misinformation and sports
  In today?s episode of our podcast Is that a fact?, guest host Jake Lloyd digs into how misinformation manifests in the sports world with author and journalist Jemele Hill, a contributing writer for The Atlantic and host of the Spotify podcast Jemele Hill is Unbothered. Hill discusses not only how sports falsehoods spread, but also how the nature of sports reporting makes it more resistant to manipulation than news coverage.
• Listening Guide: Opinion creep: How facts lost ground in the battle for our attention
  Have you ever scratched your head when reading an article or watching the news and wondered if you were getting facts or opinion? If so, you?re not alone. News organizations have not made it easy for consumers to differentiate between news and the views of an individual or media outlet.
• News Matters Unit Plan
  In this unit, students will learn about major standards of quality journalism and why news matters. Through a series of five main lessons, they will distinguish fact from fiction, zone different types of information into their primary purposes, recognize elements of quality journalism, gauge the newsworthiness of topics and stories and identify key journalism terminology. It?s meant to be a starting point for conversations about and interest in journalism.
• One Tin Soldier Rides Away
  This episode of This American Life that discusses mob mentality and how easily we can all fall victim to it. English Language Arts teachers can use It with many different texts to explore the concept of mob mentaility. For example, it can be used when teaching Lord of the Flies.
• Research and Develop a Topic
  Students learn how to research and develop a topic for a student choice project.
• Swift and Slow on the Internet You Will Go (Grade 6)
  Students will perform Google Searches, trying to answer Trivial Pursuit Questions. They will perform timed searches before learning search skills, and compare their search time after learning search skills. The skills they learn are Boolean: AND, OR, NOT and Quotation Marks.
• The Grapes of Wrath: Voices from the Great Depression
  By examining primary sources, including songs, newspapers, interviews, and photographs of migrant farm workers in California during the Great Depression, students create a scrapbook from the point of view of a migrant worker, providing evidence of the colloquial speech used by the migrants and the issues affecting their lives. Using Voices from the Dust Bowl, 1940-1941 and Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, students select photographs and use the sound recordings of voices of the migrant workers to create captions, letters, and/or songs based on these primary sources. This lesson can be used in connection with a unit on the Great Depression, and specifically on The Grapes of Wrath.
• The Industrial Age in America: Sweatshops, Steel Mills, and Factories
  About a century has passed since the events at the center of this lesson-the Haymarket Affair, the Homestead Strike, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. In this lesson, students use elementary historical sources to explore some of the questions raised by these events, questions that continue to be relevant in debates about American society: Where do we draw the line between acceptable business practices and unacceptable working conditions? Can an industrial-and indeed a post-industrial-economy succeed without taking advantage of those who do the work?

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http://www.uen.org - in partnership with Utah State Board of Education (USBE) and Utah System of Higher Education (USHE).  Send questions or comments to USBE Specialist - Naomi  Watkins and see the Language Arts - Secondary website. For general questions about Utah's Core Standards contact the Director - Jennifer  Throndsen.

These materials have been produced by and for the teachers of the State of Utah. Copies of these materials may be freely reproduced for teacher and classroom use. When distributing these materials, credit should be given to Utah State Board of Education. These materials may not be published, in whole or part, or in any other format, without the written permission of the Utah State Board of Education, 250 East 500 South, PO Box 144200, Salt Lake City, Utah 84114-4200.