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Short Story Performance Assessment: Bargain

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Bargain

by A.B. Guthrie

8th Grade English Language Arts
EDRD 602D Secondary Reading Instruction 7-12
Performance Assessment 1
Fay Van Vliet

“Before” Strategy: Activating and Focusing
Prior-Knowledge and /or concepts needed
Concept: Bullying

Building Background knowledge based on personal and text-to-world connections
(15 minutes)
To activate prior knowledge and introduce the concept of bullying, I would read the CNN.com article: “Bullying rampant in U.S. middle schools” to the class (see attached article). Following the article I would engage the students in a discussion on bullying.

Starter questions:
• How common is bullying in U.S. middle schools? (4 out of 5)
• Which students are the most
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I will have an overhead of the ladder sequence organizer and each student will have a copy to write on. As we discuss the events of the movie, I will write them beside the ladder and have the students do that also. We will then select the most important events and list them in order, starting with the bottom rung listing the 8 most important events that carry the plot to its culmination.

During the next 30 minutes, the students will be individually reading pages 231-235 of “Bargain” and doing this strategy. Since students are reading such a small selection, I will only have them fill in the bottom 4 rungs of the ladder. The directions are on their page will be as follows.
1. Outside of the ladder, list the important events in short phrases, like titles.
2. Decide if any of the events should be combined or dropped.
3. Place numbers, one-four, next to the events in chronological order.
4. Write the events using the short phrases on the ladder in chronological order.

Homework: Answer Socratic Discussion questions 1-6

Rationale: Because narrative text, and this text in particular, is organized in a sequence in which one event impacts the next, I selected a sequence organizer to help the students see this succession. This will help the students understand what lead to the culmination of Bargain. Requiring them to select the most important events to put on the ladder and sequence them will build their critical thinking ability. This activity is fitting as
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