Paired Texts with Close Reading and Essay Writing - Middle School & High School

These 19 paired passages (using 39 texts) require students to use close reading, critical thinking, and analytical writing to help them prepare for standardized assessments. In each lesson, students synthesize their reading, identifying central ideas and themes across texts. With texts that vary by genre, time period, and author, this bundle meets the needs of diverse learners and provides scaffolding with before-, during-, and post-reading strategies.

The following texts, which are available in the public domain, are included in the bundle:

• "Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau,
• "We Shall Overcome" by Lyndon Johnson,
• "Second Inaugural Address" by Abraham Lincoln,
• "Ain’t I a Woman?" by Sojourner Truth,
• "Speech to the Second Virginia Convention" by Patrick Henry,
• "The War Prayer" by Mark Twain,
• "To My Dear and Loving Husband" by Anne Bradstreet,
• "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning,
• "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar,
• "I’m Nobody! Who are you?" by Emily Dickinson,
• Native American myth "How the World Was Made,"
• Greek myth "Demeter and Persephone,"
• "Theme for English B" by Langston Hughes,
• "We Are Many" by Pablo Neruda,
• "Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin,
• "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner,
• "The Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry,
• "How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
• "The Names" by Bill Collins,
• "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell,
• "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe,
• "Sonnet 100" by Lord Brooke Fulke Greville,
• "Harlem (Dream Deferred)" by Langston Hughes,
• "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost,
• excerpt from A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry,
• "Mother to Son" by Langston Hughes,
• "The Sniper" by Liam O'Flaherty,
• "The Man He Killed" by Thomas Hardy
• Preamble to the Constitution
• The Bill of Rights
• Speech by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

In order to respect copyright, I provide online links to the following texts (many of which are also available in school texts and anthologies):

• "First Lesson" by Philip Booth,
• "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden,
• "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou,
• "Naming Myself" by Barbara Kingsolver,
• "My Name" by Sandra Cisneros,
• "The Dead of September 11" by Toni Morrison,
• "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson.

Each lesson culminates in a writing task that imitates the style of standardized assessments. These lessons incorporate all strands of the Common Core English Language Arts (ELA) Anchor Standards.

Paired Texts resources include the following:

-lesson plans with identified Common Core ELA Anchor Standards

-anticipation guides

-contextual reading guides and sample annotation passages

-sample texts

-literature webs, poetry graphic organizers, and rhetorical analysis organizers

-Venn diagrams

-essay prompts

-rubrics

-answer keys (with detailed responses for all activities and sample essays)

This bundle includes 406 pages. If you complete one of these lessons each week, they should easily last you for over four months! This bundle would be an especially helpful resource if you teach ELA to multiple grade levels. You will also find that with the detailed instructions and samples, many lessons contained in this bundle make excellent substitute plans. Furthermore, with additional licenses, this bundle would be a useful purchase for a school or English department.

This Mega Bundle includes all of my Paired Passages Writing Task lessons as of August 2023. In addition to the printable lessons, this resource may be used for distance learning with EASEL by TpT.

Do you use Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive? I've recently begun a digital bundle of my paired passages to use for online learning:

Digital Writing Tasks Bundle

Digital Writing Task Resource Road & Harlem

Digital Writing Task Resource Ain't I a Woman? and Phenomenal Woman

Meaningful and Memorable English Language Arts by © OCBeachTeacher ™

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Group licenses available.

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