ENG4U Unit 1: The Essayist's Craft

Students read Chesterton's “A Piece of Chalk,” Woolf on the essay, Emerson's “Self-Reliance,” Thoreau's “Civil Disobedience,” Du Bois's “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” and Swift's “A Modest Proposal,” studying voice, persona, aphorism, argument and satire. They write their own modest proposal in a satire lab, then find, draft, workshop and publish an original essay.

Assessment of learning: an in-class rhetorical analysis and an original essay with a writer's statement, with rubrics.

Lessons

1. What Is an Essay?
2. A Piece of Chalk
3. Voice and Persona
4. Self-Reliance
5. Civil Disobedience
6. Double Consciousness
7. Rhetorical Analysis Workshop
8. A Modest Proposal
9. The Satire Lab
10. Rhetorical Analysis
11. Finding Your Essay
12. Openings and Endings
13. Revision Studio
14. Essay Salon

What you get

• A teacher lesson plan for every lesson: curriculum expectations, learning goals and success criteria, a timed sequence, differentiation, look-fors and answer guides
• Detailed slideshows (15 to 18 slides per lesson) with speaker notes on every slide: what to say, what to ask, what to look for and how long to spend, plus worked examples, model answers and answer-key slides
• Student handouts, organizers and exit tickets
• A 20-page Essay Reader with all six essays
• Editable Word and PowerPoint files, plus PDFs
• A unit overview and the summative tasks and rubrics