“Living Like Weasels” by Annie Dillard with Mini-assessment ©

Author: Knowledge-Building Resources for Middle and High School Development Team

  • Description
  • Files

Five-day series of sample lessons includes: 

  • Text dependent questions
  • Student discussion activities
  • Vocabulary and syntax tasks 
  • Writing-based formative assessment
  • Annotations for teachers
  • CCSS-aligned mini-assessment

Note: Because the publisher will not grant permissions for reprints, you will need to gain access to copies of the text.

The knowledge-building resources follow a quad text set model developed by Comprehensive Reading Solutions and based on the article by Sarah Lupo and colleagues, “Building Background Knowledge Through Reading: Rethinking Text Sets.” In a quad text set model, three to five texts are selected that help students develop knowledge critical to the complex text at the center of the close-reading lesson. Each of these supplemental texts is paired with a lightweight text-dependent task to support students’ comprehension and knowledge-building work. Implementing these knowledge-building texts and tasks can be done in a variety of ways; they are lightweight enough to be done either during short portions of class or as homework. This work is particularly critical for students not yet reading at grade level.

Supplemental Resources