Text Complexity in the 8th Grade Social Studies Curriculum

East Meadow Union Free School District

Summer 2013

Facilitator: Laura Henry

Writers: Laura Henry, Nicholas Jantz, and Lisa Scully

Superintendent: Mr. Louis R. DeAngelo

Principals: Mrs. Stacy Breslin, Mr. James Lethbridge

Table of Contents

Title Page ...... 1

Table of Contents ...... 2

Abstract ...... 3

Rationale ...... 4

Lessons and Supporting Material...... 5-32

Work Cited…………………………………...... 33

Abstract

The primary goal of this CAP is to present close read strategies to the eighth grade faculty that demonstrates the New York State Social Studies Standards, as well as the Common Core Standards. The lessons includenumerous strategies that will increase student comprehension when reading complex historical texts. Also included in the project are appropriate resources that will support the NYS Social Studies Curriculum, such as suggested primary and secondary sources and various learning materials. These tasks support our goals of assessing students’ abilities to analyze and synthesize information, while reading complex texts.

Rationale

In keeping with the Common Core learning Standards, this curriculum area project provides teachers with lessons that include strategies to deepen students' understanding of a variety of texts. Teachers will determine the degree and nature of the complexity of the text they use and model strategies that students need to comprehend the text. Specifically addressed in this curriculum area project are the Common Core Reading and Writing Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies 6-12. The mini lessons were designed to emphasize the importance of getting students ready for the demands of college and career as well to achieve the goals and meet the standards outlined in the 8th grade social studies curriculum.

Purpose: To use close read strategies to analyze a speech.

Objectives:

  • Students will be able to read a selection of lines from a speech and predict the overall message.
  • Students will be able to read the entire speech and analyze its meaning.
  • Students will be able to discuss how throughout history, speeches have persuaded people to take action or think a certain way.

Materials:

  • Copies of the complete text from FDR's speech, “Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself”:
  • Index cards with different lines taken from the speech written on each. (Suggested quotes listed below)

Activities:

1. Say to the class, "Today we are going to read a speech. I am not going to tell you who gave the speech or what it is about. Instead, we are going to have a "quotation mingle." I have taken 8 lines from the speech and written each on an index card. You will each get a card and some of you will have the same quote. I want you to mingle with other classmates and compare your quote with someone else's quote. Think of this as arriving at a party. You circulate around the room saying hello and then making small talk. You should talk about your quote for a minute or so then move on to mingle with someone else."

2. Teacher continues, "I will give you about eight to ten minutes to mingle. While doing so, you should be trying to figure out what the speech is about, who said it and what is it persuading you to do or think. If you need a partner wave your hand in the air so someone else who needs a partner can find you. As you mingle with more people, the purpose of the speech should become clearer. Let's mingle."

3. The teacher circulates among the pairs and listens in to the conversations and encourages students to continue mingling.

4. When time is up, the teacher should say "Freeze. Now I would like you and the person you are talking with now to join the closest pair of students to you and form a group of four." The teacher will assign stragglers to a group. "Now I want you to discuss the quotes you have in front of you as well as the others you saw/heard. Can you figure out what the speech will be about? Share your thoughts and evidence with your group."

5. After three or four minutes the teacher should say, "Ok, now I would like each group to come up with a title of the speech. Write it down so you can share it in a few minutes. I will give you two minutes."

6. Reconvene the whole class and ask students to share their thoughts about what the speech will be about. Ask each group to read its title.

7. Introduce the actual speech and hand out copies of the text. Have students read it individually and use a "+" to note places where their predictions were confirmed and "-" where their predictions were refuted. Use an "*" to note the lines that you saw/heard during our mingling session.

Summary: Come together as a whole class. The teacher should ask, "So far, have your predictions been confirmed or disputed? Is the speech making sense to you? I will collect your copy of the speech with your notations on it and return it to you tomorrow to finish reading.""

Assessment: As the students read the speech, the teacher will confer to assess their level of understanding. The teacher should collect the speech with its notations and review them before continuing the next day.

NYS Common Core Learning Standards:

CCRR 4: Interpret words and phrases as they are used in the text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meaning, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.

CCRR 5: Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text relate to each other and the whole.

RH 4: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies.

Suggested Quotes:

-This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.-

-Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

-More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return

-Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for.

-Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.

-Through this program of action we address ourselves to putting our own national house in order and making income balance outgo

-With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.

-I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.

I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impel. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now.

Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.

Hand in hand with this we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land. The task can be helped by definite efforts to raise the values of agricultural products and with this the power to purchase the output of our cities. It can be helped by preventing realistically the tragedy of the growing loss through foreclosure of our small homes and our farms. It can be helped by insistence that the Federal, State, and local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced. It can be helped by the unifying of relief activities which today are often scattered, uneconomical, and unequal. It can be helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities which have a definitely public character. There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly.

Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people’s money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.

There are the lines of attack. I shall presently urge upon a new Congress in special session detailed measures for their fulfillment, and I shall seek the immediate assistance of the several States.

Through this program of action we address ourselves to putting our own national house in order and making income balance outgo. Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are in point of time and necessity secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy. I favor as a practical policy the putting of first things first. I shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment, but the emergency at home cannot wait on that accomplishment.

The basic thought that guides these specific means of national recovery is not narrowly nationalistic. It is the insistence, as a first consideration, upon the interdependence of the various elements in all parts of the United States—a recognition of the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer. It is the way to recovery. It is the immediate way. It is the strongest assurance that the recovery will endure.

In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.

With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.

Action in this image and to this end is feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors. Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.

It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.

I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.

But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.