ELA Full Year American Literature Curriculum Grades 11-12 Bundle

Set your students up for success with this zero prep, print and Google slides ready curriculum resource a full year of your American Literature course. In this resource you will find 13 units that span 36+ weeks of instruction:

• Rhetoric of the American Revolution
• Post Revolution: American Romanticism
• Prelude to the Civil War: American Transcendentalism
• The Dark Romanticism of Edgar Allan Poe
• The Anti-Slavery Rhetoric of Frederick Douglass
• Realism and Early Feminist Literature
• The Harlem Renaissance
• Literature of the Lost Generation
• The Great Gatsby
• The Southern Gothic
• The Crucible
• 20th Century American Rhetoric
• Contemporary and Diverse Short Stories

This curriculum explores the most significant texts of each era of American literature and rhetoric with a standards-based focus, so that you can teach the classics while covering every 11-12.RL and 11-12.RI standard! As American Literature progresses so does the diversity of authors, and by the end of this curriculum, your students will be reading some of the most challenging social and cultural critiques in American literature from authors of all walks of life.

Every assignment in this bundle is print ready and Google Slides compatible saving you hours and hours of prep time. Thorough answer keys make you the expert no matter the subject.

In general you can expect lessons in this bundle to include most if not all of the following:

• Daily bell ringers
• Brief lecture notes on the essential elements and themes of each story or the rhetorical and poetic devices of speeches and poems
• Embedded questions within printable texts
• Pre-reading journal prompts
• Vocabulary chart covering the etymologies of 100s of words
• Comprehension questions
• Character analysis activities
• Theme activities
• Figurative language activities
• Multiple-choice assessments anchored to 11-12.RL or 11-12.RI standards
• Vocabulary assessments
• Essay prompts
• Group discussion prompts
• Specific teaching guides for each lesson
• Thorough answer keys and essay rubrics
• And so much more!

The text of every story, poem, and speech is included except for those that are not in the public domain including the poems of Langston Hughes, the post 1920s short stories, and The Crucible. The text of The Great Gatsby has also not been included for length.

After the description of each unit below, read on to see the FREEBIES included in this bundle.

Through 13 units your students will explore the most important voices in American literature and rhetoric from the Revolution to the late 20th century. A special emphasis has been placed on the contributions of women and African Americans throughout the entire curriculum while the final unit focuses solely on the most diverse voices in contemporary literature.

In Unit 1, Rhetoric of the American Revolution, your students will:

• Study key concepts of rhetoric including ethos, pathos, and logos and rhetorical devices like antithesis, parallelism, and rhetorical questions.
• Examine the key concepts of 3 Revolutionary era texts from Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry and Ben Franklin.
• Engage in discussion and writing prompts that spur critical thinking.

In Unit 2, Post Revolution: American Romanticism, your students will:

• Learn about the origins of American literature and American myth making.
• Read 2 classic short stories from Washington Irving and 1 classic short story from Nathaniel Hawthorne.
• Examine how early American literature reflected on the past and predicted the future.

In Unit 3, Prelude to the Civil War: American Transcendentalism, your students will:

• Demonstrate quarterly proficiency on each of the RI, RL, and Writing standards that they have been working on all quarter.
• Learn the origins of American individualism from Emerson, protest from Thoreau, feminism from Fuller, and the anti-slavery movement from each of these important thinkers.
• Study the poetry of nature and the individual from Whitman, Emerson and Dickinson.

In Unit 4, The Dark Romanticism of Poe, your students will:

• Analyze Poe's contributions to American literature and Gothic horror through close readings of "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Masque of the Red Death."
• Enhance their proficiency in making inferences (11-12.RL.1) and discussing theme (11-12.RL.2)
• Engage in discussion and writing prompts that spur critical thinking.

In Unit 5, The Anti-Slavery Rhetoric of Douglass, your students will:

• Study key concepts of rhetoric including ethos, pathos, and logos and rhetorical devices like antithesis, hypophora, and synecdoche.
• Engage in a close reading and rhetorical analysis of Douglass's most famous speech "What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?"
• Conduct their own research into Douglass's other speeches and draft an expository essay using primary and secondary sources.

In Unit 6, Realism and Early Feminist Literature, your students will:

• Demonstrate their end-of-semester proficiency Literature and Writing standards. All RL standards are covered through a study of five classic short stories.
• Learn the impact that Ambrose Bierce had on modern fiction, appreciate the lasting impact of Mark Twain's political satire, and examine the foundations of feminist literature in the works of Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
• At the conclusion of this unit, students will be more than prepared to understand the literary trends that evolve in 20th century American literature.

In Unit 7, The Harlem Renaissance, your students will:

• Study key concepts of rhetoric including ethos, pathos, and logos and rhetorical devices like antithesis, parallelism, and rhetorical questions. Then they will apply these concepts to an analysis of Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" and W.E.B Du Bois's response from The Souls of Black Folks.
• Study key concepts of poetry such as speaker, audience, and purpose and poetic devices like metaphor, symbolism, hyperbole, synecdoche. Then they will apply these concepts to the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes. (Note: this lesson is editable, so you can add the text of the Langston Hughes poems if you have the legal right to do so).
• Analyze the humor, style, and Biblical allusions in Zora Neale Hurston's classic short stories "Sweat" and "Spunk."
• Conduct a research project on a Harlem Renaissance poet of their choosing.

In Unit 8, Literature of the Lost Generation, your students will:

• Examine the style of Ernest Hemingway and his "iceberg theory" of storytelling through a close study of "Hills Like White Elephants." This text has numerous questions embedded throughout allowing students to discover the truths of the conversation that Hemingway omits.
• Close read T.S. Eliot's classic "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" through embedded questions that call upon students to get the most out of their knowledge of poetic devices.
• Analyze the disjointed structure of William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" in order to investigate the "Southern Gothic" style as well as Faulkner's commentary on the evolving American South.

In Unit 9, The Great Gatsby, your students will:

• Lead the discussion on the characters, themes, setting, and allusions of the novel through a variety of supporting tasks which include: standards-based questions, quotation task cards and research activities.
• Answer Standards-Based Questions to explore the most important ideas of the novel while improving proficiency on 11-12.RL.1-7 standards (this lesson is fully editable, so that you can copy the questions into your pre-existing study guides or put them on your online learning platform).
• Answers questions on Quotation Task Cards that allow students to address all the major ideas of the novel flexibly (Use these as exit tickets, bell ringers, think-pair-share, or whole class discussion prompts).
• Complete Vocabulary and reading quizzes to support formative assessment of self-directed student learning.
• View the 2013 version of The Great Gatsby with a movie guide built from the 11-12.RL.7 questions in the fully editable Standards-Based Questions lesson.

In Unit 10, The Southern Gothic, your students will:

• Examine the qualities of Flannery O'Connor and Joyce Carol Oates writing that defined the Southern Gothic genre.
• From "Good Country People" and "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" to "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" students will be engaged from day one of the quarter with these challenging and discussion worthy classics.
• Activities for "A Good Man is Hard to Find" are included in this bundle for free, so you can change up which stories you choose to teach!
• As the year comes to a close your students will refine their proficiency in every 11-12.RL standard through close study of stories they will enjoy.

In Unit 11, The Crucible, your students will:

• Take the driver's seat as your class studies Arthur Miller's classic play.
• Lecture notes and comprehension worksheets support students who need direct instruction while quotation task cards and TQE activities allow you to flip the classroom and allow your students to teach each other all of the major concepts of The Crucible.
• By the end of this unit, your students will have made inferences, tracked themes, discussed symbolism, explored the setting, and begun to consider the allegorical implications presented in the play.

In Unit 12, 20th Century American Rhetoric, your students will:

• Demonstrate their proficiency on 11-12.RI standards one final time for the year.
• After brushing up on a variety of rhetorical terms and devices, students will critique Senator McCarthy's "Enemies from Within" speech. This rhetorical analysis bridges the gap between literature and rhetoric as the callbacks to The Crucible couldn't be more obvious.
• Then students will look at JFK's Inaugural Address and LBJ's "We Shall Overcome" speech on the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Not only are both speeches wonderful examples of the power of rhetoric, but also both serve as counterarguments to McCarthy's cynicism.
• Time permitting, students will also analyze Reagan's "Address on the Explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger." This speech ties back to the pioneer spirit on which America was founded, and is engaging way to find meaning in tragedy.

In Unit 13, Contemporary and Diverse Short Stories, your students will:

• Read four short stories: "Indian Education" by Sherman Alexie, "Lullaby" by Leslie Marmon Silko, "The Lesson" by Toni Cade Bambara, and "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri.
• Each author presents a perspective that your students have not encountered in the curriculum until this point.
• Go beyond the standards and allow your students to examine the social and cultural commentary of some of the best short stories of the last 50 years.

Included FREE in this bundle:

MLA 9 Works Cited Page & In-Text Citations: Notes and Worksheets

Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find Comprehension and Assessment

Alice Walker's The Flowers Comprehension and Assessment

With every short story, poem, and speech included in print-ready format, this resource will cover at least 36 weeks of lessons and possibly more! Craft the foundation for your students' understanding of American literary heritage with this full year curriculum today!