Handout
Essay Structure and Sentence Starters
Give students this planning sheet to help them structure and write effective essays.
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Identity and Storytelling Assessment Ideas
Create a culminating experience for your students that helps them draw new connections between the concepts and ideas presented in this text set, themselves, and the world today.
Why Identity Matters
Students reflect on how aspects of their identities are more visible or felt in certain situations and read an informational text to help them consider the interplay between individual identity and social identity.
Rose, Thorn, Bud
The Rose, Thorn, Bud exercise increases students' self-awareness as they reflect on recent successes, challenges, and opportunities.
Fist to Five
Students communicate how they are feeling in response to a chosen prompt, giving teachers a pulse on the class’s opinions or well-being.
First Chapter Fridays
Read aloud a chapter of a book your students are interested in to build community around stories and storytelling.
Compass Points
Students get an opportunity to give feedback about the class and communicate their needs and worries.
Exit Cards
Students share how they are feeling, what their needs are, and what goals they’d like to set in an exit card.
Establishing Opening and Closing Routines
These opening and closing classroom routines will set a welcoming tone, allow students to connect with one another, and encourage goal setting.
Authoring My Identity
Students explore the costs and benefits of sharing aspects of their identities, discuss an informational text about “narrative identity,” and apply these concepts to their own lives in an original poem.
The resources I’m getting from my colleagues through Facing History have been just invaluable.
—
Claudia Bautista, Santa Monica, Calif
