These themes are ones the students face during middle school and into high school. They are on a quest for identity, and the text allows the students to visualize changes in development, and how to handle them. It will also help them to understand that everyone experiences issues of identity, and that it is normal at this age. I picked The Outsiders because it was a text that my eighth grade students were currently reading at Samuel Yellin during my first practicum; the students were super engaged during class discussions based on major themes that occur in the text, and they are able to make connections to their life. Their enthusiasm led me to believe that it would be a great novel to create several lessons with.]
[S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders is a coming of age novel that was published in 1967. The novel is set in Oklahoma, and it is narrated by a …show more content…
These plans build on each other because they ask the students to progress their close reading skills by reading different sources of texts. Since the students read The Outsiders, I wanted to give them an assignment that also gives them practice at close reading other literary works like poems. Therefore, students will read Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” which is a more complicated text to analyze then the novel. The poem and the novel are related because they exemplify the same major themes that young adults can relate. The poem is also different from the novel because it requires a different kind of reading; students need to look for imagery, personification, and how the meter works to connect both form and theme. Informational texts are also different from poetry and fictional novels because they portray realistic occurrences. Even though the novel portrays real life events, none of the characters exist or have been through these exact events. Informational texts give us factual information and students should read them to learn more information and relate it back to the novel. It is important to learn how to effectively close read texts, because as students move through high school and college they will need to write papers based on their analysis. Therefore, students will be writing a five paragraph essay about The Outsiders or the Robert Frost poem,