[ELA] English/Language Arts 7 Semester B (2 of 2): Extended Campus (SM)

In this course, you will focus on learning reading skills based on literary texts. The texts come from various genres. They include a novel and excerpts from novels, short stories, poems, and plays. The course’s reading selections demonstrate ways to understand explicit and implicit information, theme, characters, plot, poetic and dramatic techniques, and figurative language, among other ideas and concepts. You will read the entire novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in almost every lesson throughout the course. You will read excerpts from the novel Black Beauty and a passage from Grimm’s “The Golden Bird” fairy tale. You will also read stories and plays about challenging situations, discovering alternate realities, and robot rebellions. You will witness powerful historical events and people, and you’ll compare how written texts are portrayed in film or audio. Additionally, you will read poems from famous poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and William Wordsworth, to name a few.

As you read the novels, short stories, poems, and plays in this course, you will identify central ideas and themes; make inferences; analyze word choice; identify figurative, connotative, and sensory language; and compare and contrast different text mediums—drama to audio, novel to video. In addition, you will learn about basics in grammar, usage, and punctuation, including correct spelling, misplaced and dangling modifiers, verb tenses and participles, and parallel structure and antecedents. You will also learn 20 new vocabulary words in each of the first five units of the course.

In addition, you will learn the elements of narrative writing so that you can plan, create, write, revise, and edit your own personal narrative. You will also learn about different forms of poetry and their characteristics. You will learn about different poetic techniques to apply these skills and write a poem of your own in the assigned poetic form and structure. Through the lessons provided in this course, you will master techniques that will help you achieve a deeper appreciation of literary texts as well as of narrative and poetry writing.