English Language Arts, Grade 7 Module 2

Paths to College and Career is a new, comprehensive English Language Arts curriculum for grades 6 to 12 built from the ground up over a three-year period to address the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English Language Arts and Literacy. It reflects a deep understanding of the standards and assessments, and is written with a focus on the shifts in instructional practice and student experiences the standards require. It includes daily lesson plans, guiding questions, recommended texts, scaffolding strategies, and other classroom resources. Paths to College and Career provides teachers, schools, and districts with a concrete and practical ELA instructional program that engages students with compelling and complex texts. At each grade level, Paths to College and Career delivers a yearlong curriculum that develops all students’ ability to • read closely and engage in text-based discussions, • build evidence-based claims and arguments, • conduct research and write from sources, and • expand their academic vocabulary. Paths to College and Career’s instructional resources address the needs of all learners, including students with disabilities, English language learners, and gifted and talented. The curriculum is flexible, user friendly, engaging, and purposefully built to prepare students for career, college, and life. In this module, students explore the issue of working conditions, both historical and modern day. As they read and discuss both literary and informational text, students analyze how people, settings, and events interact in a text and how an author develops a central claim. Students will read Lyddie, a novel that tells the story of a young girl who goes to work in the Lowell mills and explores the issue of working conditions in industrializing America, as well as a speech by César Chávez, in which he explains how the United Farm Workers empowered farmworkers. Through an investigation of working conditions in the modern day garment industry, students explore how businesses can affect working conditions, both positively and negatively. As a final performance task, students create a consumer’s guide to working conditions in the garment industry.