January Unit: Non-Fiction Article Deep-Dive

a.k.a. Article of the Week Super-Quest

Occasionally during the year, I find myself setting truly fantastic articles aside because they will require more digging and learning and discussing than I have time for in one class period (which is how much time I dedicate to Article of the Week) or because an article is very long (and I know students will struggle to get through it).

With two instructional weeks dangling at the end of December before break, I decided to do a deep-dive into a single, spectacular article.

Here were my goals:

• Read + thoroughly understand Clint Smith’s incredible recent article “Monuments to the Unthinkable”. Rather than jumping through a bunch of nonfiction articles in this unit, I wanted to see how much meaning we could mine in a single article.

• Review comprehension strategies from earlier Articles of the Week (and, but, so; most important sentence; word gap field note).

• Learn new strategies for identifying the most significant supporting details (Gather Up the Facts; How Do I Know?; Important vs. Interesting) — this was where my students scored lowest as a group on a recent standardized test!

• Build a connection between Clint Smith and the students as writers

• Improve our discussion skills with the TQE method.

I used Clint Smith’s article because it’s just SO GOOD. And it’s long. And my students spent a lot of time last year learning about the civil war, Richmond’s Confederate monuments, and the Holocaust. They also have watched Clint Smith’s Crash Course Black American History and some of his poetry.

So I knew this article would be meaningful to them.

However, you do not have to use this specific article. You can use any article you think is worthy of multiple class periods. You don’t need to have a pre-existing Article of the Week routine! You can just embark upon this as a non-fiction mini-unit.

(I will be doing just that — a non-fiction mini-unit culminating in the New York Times student one-pager contest with my seventh graders this month!)

I had never taught non-fiction this way, so I was interested to know if it made any difference to students’ learning (or if I was just being annoying by making them return to the same article for two weeks). At the end of the unit, I surveyed them:

I also asked them which learning experience had the biggest impact on their understanding:

Okay! On with the show! Here’s the unit plan with all of my resources: