"Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand and "Farewell to Manzanar" by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston & James D. Houston ©

Authors: David Riesenfeld, Knowledge-Building Resources for Middle and High School Development Team

  • Description
  • Files

Four-to-five day series of sample lessons includes: 

  • Text dependent questions
  • Printable copies of the text
  • Student discussion activities
  • Vocabulary and syntax tasks
  • Writing-based formative assessment
  • Annotations for teachers

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.

  • Grade 8 "Unbroken" and "Farewell to Manzanar" ©

  • Building Knowledge with a Close-Reading Lesson Unbroken and A Farewell to Manzanar

Supplemental Resources