6th Grade ELA

Lesson Plan January 29th

Content Standards Addressed

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.6.1
Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence.
➔ CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.6.1.A
Introduce claim and organize the reasons and evidence clearly.
➔ CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.6.1.B
Support claim with clear reasons and relevant evidence, using credible sources and
demonstrating an understanding of the topic or text.
➔ CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.6.1.C
Use words, phrases, and clauses to clarify the relationships among claim and reasons.

Understandings
1. Students will understand the basic structure of a literary essay about character, including
how to make a claim and support that claim with evidence.
2. Students will understand how to make a claim about a character in a story they’ve read,
and use evidence from that story about their character to effectively support that claim.

Evidence Outcomes
LT: I can make a claim about a character from a story I’ve read and support that claim with
evidence from that story
This means: Students will be able to write “flash drafts” of a literary essay about character using
the Boxes and Bullets essay structure
Procedures
I. Read 15
II. Anticipatory Set → activating prior knowledge + engagement
A. Introduce that we’ll be writing an essay about a story we’ve read as a class today
in an “Essay Bootcamp”
B. Have students retell what they remember of “Harlem’s Little Blackbird” to each
other
C. Gather class and retell story together
III. Procedures
A. Claim and support: Explain to students that when you write an essay, you need to
make a claim about whatever it is you’re writing about. For us, we’re writing
about character, so we’ll be making a claim about our character, Florence Mills.
1. Claim: “Florence Mills is an admirable character”
 2. Explain structure: for essays, instead of timeline (mountain/elements of
plot) we create outlines → one way to organize is to write about your
reasons.
3. Have students, in partners, come up with reasons why Florence Mills is an
admirable character -- this will be the support for your claim → I write
“Florence Mills is an admirable character because a, because b, and most
of all, because c.”
4. Share out as a class, and come up with our claim out loud
B. Evidence: Now that we have claim and reasons to support our claim, we need to
fill in our outline with evidence from our story that proves that all of this is true.
Think of scenes or details from Harlem’ Little Black Bird that you can use to
support your reasons for Mills being an admirable character.
1. Show structure students can use to “write” this part of their essay
a) “One reason [character] is [trait] is because…
(1) For example, A
(2) For example, A
2. Have students “write” this part of their essays with their partner through
discussions
3. Share out with class and add on to class essay
4. Discuss “unpacking evidence” by using “this illustrates” or “this shows”
5. Discuss using transitions to get to your next body paragraph using
“another reason…” or “Although one reason is… another reason is…”
6. Give students time to continue “writing” their essays together
C. Reveal Boxes and Bullets Essay Structure
D. Debrief: Name what students have completed and reread the learning target
E. Ask students to write a “flash draft” character essay on Florence Mills in their
writer’s notebooks
Closure
Revisit Learning Target: I can make a claim about a character from a story I’ve read and support
that claim with evidence from that story; ask students to give a “fist to five” check in, one being
“I don’t get it” and five being “I’ve totally got this” → ask students with fours and fives up to
explain how they know they have it, make note of the ones and twos → affirm students that this
is what they’ve accomplished today, and celebrate the fact that they wrote an entire essay in one
day

Assessment
I will collect their writer’s notebooks and look over whatever they’ve accomplished in their flash
drafts as an informal assessment in order to guide how much more time we have to spend on
structure in this unit.