Kino, a poor pearl diver, discovers an extraordinarily valuable pearl and believes it will finally lift his family out of poverty. Instead, the pearl draws greed, suspicion, and violence into his life, and the people around him start to see him differently once they think he has something worth taking. Steinbeck's short parable explores how quickly wealth can corrupt intentions, the sharp class divide between Kino's community and the colonial town, and how much of what happens to us is fate versus the choices we make anyway.

Age-appropriateness: This was designed for 7th graders. It is a short read, about 90 pages across six chapters, which makes it a strong introductory novel for literature circles. The language has some real challenge to it, Steinbeck doesn't write down to his reader, but the length keeps the overall workload manageable for a first attempt at this kind of independent analysis.

Standards overview: This unit centers on theme, conflict, and character. It tracks how Kino changes as the pearl's influence grows, identifying the internal and external conflicts driving the plot, and analyzing what Steinbeck's parable structure is actually arguing about: greed and fate.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.7.1 – Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly and inferentially.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.7.2 – Determine a theme and analyze its development over the course of the text; provide an objective summary.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.7.3 – Analyze how particular elements of a story interact, how setting shapes character or plot.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.7.1 – Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence.

Exact standard numbers reflect CCSS ELA and may need to be double-checked against your state's current adopted edition.

Project overview: Students complete a Wanted Poster (see project specs) built around a character they choose to "indict" based on that character's thoughts and actions, supported by specific evidence from the text, along with a unit test that includes two essay options.

• The Wanted Poster works well specifically because this is often students' first sustained literature circle experience. It asks for real textual evidence and character analysis.

  •  The "wanted for" paragraph requires 5+ sentences grounded in specific facts from the book, but wraps that rigor in a creative, visual format that lowers the intimidation factor of a first big analytical writing task. 

  • The rubric should still hold students to real standards, content, accuracy, mechanics, but the format itself makes the thinking feel more like a puzzle than a test. 

• An end-of-unit essay test then adds the more traditional, formal writing piece to balance out the creative project.

This unit surrounds a set of tiered Holocaust literature titles. Before beginning literature circles, I start with lessons on historical context, scaffolding students before they ever open their books: what genocide is, the Nazi rise to power, the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, and an allegory entry point using "Terrible Things," which can be found in the public domain. Apart from "Terrible Things," my selected teaching materials come from Teaching The Diary of Anne Frank, an in-depth resource available on Amazon. My copy included a DVD with survivor interviews.

The literature circles coincide with reading The Diary of Anne Frank in drama form, and I use YouTube to watch supplementary film clips that bring the diary to life. I also give students a day to explore The Secret Annex on the Anne Frank House website.

The unit closes with selected Holocaust Museum slides on modern-day genocide and a teacher-facilitated whole-group discussion. The Holocaust Museum has a wonderful set of printable resources for educators. 

It's important that the historical content never lives in just one book, but is built into the entire six weeks.

Titles Used

Nonfiction

•  Night (Elie Wiesel) 

• The Hiding Place (Corrie ten Boom).

Fiction

• The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)

• The Devil's Arithmetic (Jane Yolen)

• Sarah's Key (Tatiana de Rosnay), higher-level students only 

• The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (John Boyne), higher-level students only

• The Zookeeper's Wife (Diane Ackerman), higher-level students only

More information about the titles can be found here.

Age-appropriateness: This unit was designed for a mixed group of 7th and 8th graders. The tiered structure exists specifically because Holocaust literature varies widely in intensity, some titles handle the subject through more distance or a younger narrator's perspective, while the higher-tier titles ask more of a reader emotionally and historically. The eight lessons of scaffolding beforehand exist so no student walks into any of these books without the historical context to hold what they're about to read.

Standards overview: This unit centers on historical context feeding literary analysis. Students track theme and character development against a real historical backdrop, evaluate an author's choices in representing trauma and memory, and synthesize independent reading with supplementary nonfiction and primary-source-adjacent material.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.7.2 / RL.8.2 – Determine a theme and analyze its development over the course of the text.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.7.9 / RL.8.9 – Analyze how a modern work draws on themes from traditional or historical material.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.7.9 / RI.8.9 – Analyze how two or more authors present the same historical event, emphasizing different evidence.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.7.2 / W.8.2 – Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas through selection and analysis of content.

Exact standard numbers reflect CCSS ELA and may need to be double-checked against your state's current adopted edition.

Project Options: Overviews

Choose one of two paths for students' final project.

Standard Options

The standard path contains four options to choose from: 

• A Character Diary written from a main character's point of view

• A Character Interview imagining a sit-down with a main character

• A Newspaper Article covering one major event from the novel

• Traditional Literary Report using a provided template. 

All four run 500–750 words in MLA format, and depth and evidence of careful reading matter more than decoration.

Alternate Project - Multi-Genre Writing

Students complete a writing project that requires them to create a collection of five shorter pieces exploring a single, well-researched Holocaust topic from multiple angles and voices, each grounded in real historical research with endnotes stating where information derived, rather than one traditional research paper or book report.

This project earns its place here because a single-genre paper tends to flatten a subject this heavy into one register, one voice, one kind of claim.

Asking students to move across five genres forces them to keep encountering the same historical material from different angles. For example, a letter demands a different kind of empathy than a newspaper article does, which mirrors the actual demand this unit makes of them throughout: hold multiple perspectives on the same atrocity at once.

The research and documentation requirements keep it academically rigorous even though the format is creative, and the variety gives both stronger and more reluctant writers a genre where they can find real footing.

However, and this is the real disclaimer, this could be laborious if you require all the writing to be due at once. When I facilitated this, students had to submit one piece of writing each week of the literature circle unit, and then a polished draft at the end.

Celeste Marconi's life on Butterfly Hill ends the day Chile's military coup drives her parents into hiding and sends her into exile in the United States, alone in a country whose language she doesn't speak. Agosín's semi-autobiographical novel follows Celeste through exile, homesickness, and eventual return, asking what a dictatorship costs ordinary families and how much of a person survives being uprooted

Age-appropriateness: This was designed for 8th graders. The novel handles a difficult subject, disappearance, censorship, and state violence under Pinochet's regime (without graphic depiction), keeping it appropriate for middle schoolers while still respecting the weight of the history. Agosín's prose leans poetic and image-heavy rather than plot-driven, which asks more patience of a reader than a faster-moving novel would, but the emotional throughline of a girl separated from her family keeps it accessible.

Standards overview: This unit centers on setting, cultural context, and the research process. It tracks how displacement and government change shape Celeste and the people around her. It asks students to read historical fiction against real history, and builds toward an independent research project grounded in a topic the novel raises.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.1 – Cite textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says explicitly and inferentially.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.3 – Analyze how particular lines of dialogue or incidents propel the action, reveal character, or provoke a decision.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.6 – Analyze how differences in the points of view of characters create effects such as suspense or humor.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.8.7 – Conduct short research projects to answer a question, drawing on several sources and generating additional related questions for further research.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.8.8 – Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess credibility and accuracy, and avoid plagiarism.

Exact standard numbers reflect CCSS ELA and may need to be double-checked against your state's current adopted edition.

Project overview: Students complete a Personalized Research Paper (specs in writing projects) on a topic connected to the novel, Chilean politics, Hispanic and Latino culture, the military and wars connected to Chile, or the refugee experience, researched independently and written up in narrative form.

• • The Personalized Research Paper works well as this unit's project specifically because the novel raises real historical questions a young reader wouldn't otherwise think to ask. Letting students choose their own angle keeps the research self-directed instead of assigned.

  • The "What I Know, Assume, or Imagine" section requires students to name their assumptions before they research, then hold those assumptions up against what they actually find, which builds the habit of testing what you think you know rather than defending it.

  • Writing the research process itself as narrative, "The Search," keeps the rigor of an academic paper (two reputable sources minimum, no Wikipedia) wrapped in a format students find more approachable than a standard research essay.

Pairing the research paper with the ongoing Spanish Word Log and double-entry journal keeps language study, close reading, and independent research all moving together across the same ten weeks.

Groups of students build an original society (utopian, dystopian, or post-apocalyptic) inspired by a novel or film from the dystopian canon, then bring that society to life through a creative presentation, a written manifesto, and a symbolic time capsule. This is a legacy project from my predecessor, Laura Courtney, in the Honors English curriculum, refined over several years of classroom use, and it consistently draws some of the strongest student engagement of the semester.

Age-Appropriateness: This project is built for Honors 10th grade students working in mixed-ability groups. The structure is intentionally flexible enough to make that grouping work: students distribute themselves across research, writing, creative design, and presentation roles, so a group can pool different strengths rather than needing every member to perform identically on every component. Sophomores are old enough to engage seriously with the political and philosophical questions raised by dystopian literature (government, control, human rights, the cost of order or freedom) while still benefiting from the scaffolding a group project provides around a topic that could otherwise feel abstract or overwhelming tackled alone.

Standards Overview

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.2 — Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development. Students have to identify what their chosen novel or film is actually arguing about power, order, or human nature before they can meaningfully build on it.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.9 — Analyze how an author draws on and transforms source material. This is close to the intellectual core of the project: students aren't summarizing their source text, they're doing to it what authors do to source material, transforming it into something new.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.7 — Conduct short research projects to answer a question or solve a problem, narrowing or broadening inquiry as needed. Covered by the research and inspiration phase.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.2 — Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas clearly. This is the direct target of the written manifesto.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.1 — Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly. The entire group design process depends on this.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.4 — Present information, findings, and supporting evidence clearly, concisely, and logically, with organization and development appropriate to purpose and audience. Covered by the creative presentation requirement.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.5 — Make strategic use of digital media in presentations to enhance understanding and add interest. Relevant for groups choosing a video, slides, or website format.

Project Overview: Why This Works: This project has stayed in the curriculum for years for a good reason: it gives students a genuine creative outlet inside a rigorous literary framework, and it rewards a wide range of student strengths at once. A student who struggles with traditional literary analysis can still shine designing a time capsule or leading a presentation, while a stronger writer can anchor the manifesto. That range is exactly why mixed-ability grouping works so well here rather than working against the project.

The multi-format structure (research, writing, visual or performative presentation, physical artifact) also means students are practicing transfer, taking an abstract thematic understanding of a dystopian or utopian text and expressing it across several different modes. 

That's a more durable kind of comprehension check than a single essay or test, and it's a large part of why the project consistently produces some of the most memorable, most invested work of the year.

Students move through Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird in rotating literature circle roles, meeting twice weekly to bring their prepared work to the group. Reading is paired with journaling, peer response, and a rotating cast of discussion jobs, and the unit closes with a group-produced newspaper that channels everything students have gathered along the way into comic strips, articles, an op-ed, and a vocabulary game. This is another legacy project from my predecessor, Laura Courtney, that is a hit with students.

Age-Appropriateness: This unit is built for 10th grade students. To Kill a Mockingbird asks a lot of its readers: racial injustice, moral courage under social pressure, the gap between a community's stated values and its actual behavior. Sophomores are ready to sit with those questions seriously, but the book club structure keeps the weight manageable. No student is carrying the full analytical load alone. 

The rotating roles (Discussion Director, Word Wizard, Bridge Builder, Reporter, Researcher) break the work of understanding a dense novel into pieces a student can specialize in and rotate through, so the same student who leads a tough discussion on trial testimony gets a turn at something lighter, like tracking word choice, later in the unit. The eight-week pacing, with two meetings a week and a clear reading schedule, keeps a long novel from becoming an undifferentiated slog.

Standards Overview

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.1 — Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis. The Reporter and Discussion Director roles both require students to ground their contributions in specific passages rather than general impressions.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.2 — Determine a theme or central idea and analyze its development through specific details. This runs through the whole discussion structure, especially the Discussion Director's questions and the group's revisited discussion points.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.3 — Analyze how complex characters develop, interact, and advance the plot or theme. Directly targeted by the Reporter role sheet's character-tracking section.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.4 — Determine the meaning of words and phrases as used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings, and analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone. This is the entire job of the Word Wizard role.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.6 — Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work of literature. Central to the Bridge Builder's text-to-world connections and to the novel's central subject matter.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.3 — Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences using effective technique and well-chosen details. Covered by the double-entry journal's personal response component.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.9 — Draw evidence from literary texts to support analysis, reflection, and research. Underlies the journal entries, peer responses, and Bridge Builder connections alike.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.7 — Conduct short research projects to answer a question, drawing on several sources. This is the Researcher role and one direct line to the final newspaper's article requirement.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.1 — Write arguments to support claims with valid reasoning and relevant evidence. Targeted by the Op-Ed requirement in the final project.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.1 — Initiate and participate effectively in collaborative discussions, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly. This is the backbone of every Tuesday and Friday book club meeting.

Project Overview: Why This Works

The rotating role structure is what keeps this unit from becoming five weeks of the same discussion format on repeat. Every two weeks, a student who was digging into word choice is suddenly responsible for leading discussion, and a student who was tracking plot and setting is suddenly building bridges to the world outside the book. 

That rotation does double duty: it keeps engagement high because the job never gets stale, and it means every student practices every kind of literary thinking (close reading, discussion leadership, synthesis, real-world connection, independent research) rather than settling into one comfortable lane for the whole unit.

The final newspaper project is the unit's strongest move. Rather than one more essay, it asks students to take everything they've gathered (character development, tone, historical and social context, argumentative stance) and translate it into distinct real-world genres: a comic strip, a straight news article, a researched feature, an op-ed, a vocabulary game. That range means students are demonstrating comprehension through multiple modes at once, which is a much better test of whether the reading actually landed than a single uniform assignment would be.

Unit Rhythm

• The unit runs across eight weeks with a steady two-meeting-a-week rhythm:

• Milestone deliverables land throughout the schedule rather than all at once: 

  • A comic strip in Week 2, 

  • An article in week 3, 

  • A vocabulary game in week 5, and 

  • An op-ed in week 6

The newspaper's components get built incrementally instead of crammed in at the end.

• Closing weeks shift from reading to production. Once the book is finished in week 7, the final week is dedicated work time followed by the group project's due date, giving students a clear runway to assemble everything into the finished newspaper.

Students pair their reading of The Scarlet Letter with a mix of individual and group creative and analytical work: an original song, a personal essay wrestling with sin, judgment, and the role of civil government, a self-designed "scarlet letter" confronting a flaw in their own character, and group-built quizzes and a soundtrack. Run through literature circles, this is a legacy project from my predecessor, Laura Courtney, in the American Literature 11/12 curriculum that has held up well over years of classroom use.

Age-Appropriateness: This project is built for juniors and seniors in American Literature. That maturity matters here more than in most units, since the assignment asks students to hold Hawthorne's novel up against their own lives directly, most pointedly in the "Your Scarlet Letter" component, where students have to name an actual flaw or sin in their own character and sit with it honestly rather than analyzing Hester's from a safe distance.

The essay's questions (the solution to sin, how to respond to people who sin, whether civil government should enforce the laws of God) ask for real theological and civic reasoning, not just literary commentary, which is appropriate for older students in a Christian school setting who are ready to think through faith, ethics, and law together rather than treating them as separate categories. The literature circle structure gives students a peer group to process these questions with before they're asked to commit anything to paper individually.

Standards Overview

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.2 — Determine two or more themes and analyze how they interact and build on one another. The unit asks students to hold multiple themes at once (sin, judgment, hypocrisy, the relationship between civil and moral law) rather than isolating one.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.3 — Analyze the impact of the author's choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story. Central to the "Your Scarlet Letter" component's close comparison between Hester's letter and the student's own, including why Hawthorne chose the color, placement, and visibility he did.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.1 — Write arguments to support claims using valid reasoning and relevant evidence. This is the direct target of the essay's three questions, each of which asks students to argue a position from multiple angles (the book's view, a biblical view, and their own).

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.3 — Write narratives using effective technique and well-chosen details. Covered by the song, which asks students to inhabit a specific perspective (author, reader, or a character) and render it in a creative form.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.6 — Use technology to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products. Directly targeted by the Google Forms quizzes and the collaborative soundtrack and album cover design.

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1 — Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions. The literature circle format and the group quiz and soundtrack components both depend on this.

Project Overview: Why This Works

What makes this project hold up year after year is that it refuses to let students stay at arm's length from the material. Most Scarlet Letter units ask students to analyze Hester's shame from the outside. This one turns the lens around and asks students to build their own scarlet letter, which means the unit's emotional and ethical stakes are personal rather than purely academic. That's a harder assignment to phone in, and it tends to produce the kind of writing and reflection that students actually remember later.

The essay does similar work on the intellectual side by refusing to let "the biblical view" and "your view" collapse into the same answer. Asking students to work through the book's view, the Puritan view, a biblical view, and their own view as four separate, gradable components means they can't default to restating what they think the teacher wants to hear. They have to actually reason through where those views agree and where they diverge, particularly on a question as loaded as whether civil government should enforce the laws of God.

The group components (the quizzes and the soundtrack) balance the intensely personal individual work with something lighter and more collaborative. Building a shared soundtrack and album cover gives students a low-stakes creative outlet after the weight of the essay and the personal letter, and it keeps the literature circle functioning as an actual community around the text rather than five students working in parallel isolation.