Curriculum  /  ELA  /  8th Grade  /  Unit 8: Making Change: Speeches, Essays, and Articles (2020)  /  Lesson 3

Making Change: Speeches, Essays, and Articles (2020)

Lesson 3
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ELA

Unit 8

8th Grade

Lesson 3 of 11

Objective

Summarize an article and determine its central idea. 

Readings and Materials

  • Article: “Why Demonstrating is Good for Kids” by Lisa Damour 

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Target Task

Writing Prompt

How does the author support her main idea about the value of civic engagement? Provide at least two different pieces of evidence from the text, and explain how they support her main idea.

Key Questions

  • Summarize the conclusions of the study. Be sure to include all of the most important findings. Your summary should be 3–4 sentences. 

  • Read the following sentence from the article: "the study’s authors suggest that positive, lasting outcomes may result if organized civic engagement helps young people galvanize their belief in their personal efficacy, connect to empowering social networks, or cultivate professional skills." Using a dictionary, define any unknown words and then explain this idea in your own words. 

  • How might the author respond to the idea that there are downsides to activism? Provide at least two pieces of evidence from the text to support your answer. 

  • Discussion: Do you believe that it is important to engage in activism even if you are unable to achieve your goal? Why or why not? What does this article suggest about this question? 

Lesson Guidance

Homework

Notes

  • Ask students: why should young people be civically engaged even if they are too young to vote? 

Standard and Literary Concepts

  • Like a theme in a literary text, a central idea is the author’s primary message that he or she is trying to communicate about the main topic in a nonfiction text. This is the big idea; if nothing else, the reader should understand this idea by the end of the text.
  • A central idea isn’t an idea that the author comes up with at the very end of a text—effective authors carefully develop this idea throughout the text through details, examples, images, etc. By 8th grade, readers should be able to both identify the central idea and the various places in the text that this idea is developed. 
  • While literary texts will rarely state the theme of the text explicitly, nonfiction texts will sometimes state the central idea clearly. Looking at the introduction and ending of texts can provide clues to the central idea. 

Common Core Standards

  • RI.8.2 — Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to supporting ideas; provide an objective summary of the text.

Next

Determine the meaning of unknown words through context clues and determine a speaker’s tone based on specific words and phrases used in the text. 

Lesson 4
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Lesson Map

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