This week marks the penultimate week for this year’s Great TWSS Adventure. If you have kept up with the schedule, you will be encountering the final unit, Unit 9. In this section of Structure and Style, students learn how to write formal critiques. Different from a book report, a critique delves deeper, having the student analyze the story to make a recommendation about the book.
Because students have already encountered writing from the Story Sequence Chart in Unit 3, students find that Unit 9 is generally fun to learn because the body paragraphs follow this same chart. What is new is that students are now adding a conclusion and an introduction to the body paragraphs.
The formal critique model works well for a variety of source texts, including short stories, fables, novels, narrative poems, and even plays and movies. Music that has a narrative structure also fits this model. Before beginning a Unit 9 critique using a long source text, provide many opportunities for your students to practice writing by using brief pieces, such as a short story. More experienced Structure and Style students can expand beyond the Unit 9 model to explore response to literature models as well as eventually to literary analysis essays.
An example of a Unit 9 assignment for Level A students can be found in Ancient History-Based Writing Lessons in Lessons 27 and 28, where students read a short story called “The Taming of Bucephalus” and then write a critique about it. Notice that this assignment is spread out over two lessons so that the students can spread out their time to write the critique, focusing first on the body paragraphs in the first lesson and then writing the conclusion and introduction in the second.
In contrast, after first writing a Unit 9 critique about a children’s book, Level C students who are working in Lesson 24 of Advanced U.S. History-Based Writing Lessons write a literary analysis essay on the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The prompt asks students to discuss how and what Atticus Finch teaches his children. In this essay students provide MLA citations from the novel to support their assertions.
Here is the homework for this final week:
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Watch Video 9 all the way through.
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Read pages 147‒157 in your Seminar Workbook.
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Complete the practicum assignment:
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Write a 5-paragraph critique using “The Fox and the Crow” outline that you created in Unit 3, using the Unit 9 checklist (pages 155‒156).
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We hope you have enjoyed your journey with us this summer. Fall is knocking on our doors. Don’t neglect to submit all of your hard work to our accreditation team to be evaluated for accreditation at the Registered Level. Families are actively looking for instructors who can confidently teach Structure and Style.
