Curriculum Map

English I

Build high school reading and writing fluency through literary analysis, informational texts, narrative and argumentative composition, grammar, vocabulary, and research. All five TEKS ELA strands — Reading, Writing, Research, Listening/Speaking, and Conventions. TEKS §110.36 aligned.

14 Units

Early Units (Foundation)

Building Skills

Advanced Concepts

Capstone/Synthesis

Active Reading: Making Meaning from Text

Students develop close reading strategies — annotation, inference, and textual evidence — using Frederick Douglass's autobiography as a primary anchor text. Reading becomes an active conversation between reader and writer.

3-4 days

The Architecture of Stories

Students analyze the craft elements that give fiction its power — plot structure, characterization, point of view, and theme — using Poe's 'The Cask of Amontillado' as a primary text for close analysis.

3-4 days

The Compressed Art: Poetry and Figurative Language

Students develop skills to read poems closely and confidently — analyzing figurative language, meter, sound devices, and poetic form using Dickinson, Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, and Langston Hughes as anchor texts.

3-4 days

Reading the Real World: Informational Text Analysis

Students master the skills of analyzing informational texts — recognizing text structure, evaluating evidence and reasoning, identifying author's purpose, and detecting bias — using historical documents and journalism as primary texts.

3-4 days

Building Arguments: Claims, Evidence, and Reasoning

Students learn to construct rigorous, well-reasoned arguments — building defensible thesis statements, integrating evidence, addressing counterarguments, and deploying rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos) in a complete argumentative essay.

3-4 days

Finding Your Voice: Narrative and Personal Writing

Students learn the craft moves that transform a personal experience into a compelling narrative — using sensory detail, scene construction, dialogue, voice, and the revision process to make a reader feel present in a moment that belongs to the writer.

3-4 days

Research and Synthesis: Building Knowledge from Sources

Students learn to conduct focused research — generating meaningful research questions, evaluating sources using the CRAAP test, synthesizing multiple sources into original understanding, and citing in MLA format while avoiding plagiarism.

3-4 days

Grammar as Choice: How Sentence Structure Creates Meaning

Students discover that grammar is not merely a set of rules to follow but a toolkit of choices — how sentence structure, punctuation, voice, and clause arrangement shape what a text communicates and how a reader experiences it.

3-4 days

Words and Their Worlds: Vocabulary Strategies

Students build strategies for encountering unfamiliar words — using context clues, morphological analysis, and awareness of connotation versus denotation — and explore how word choice shapes meaning and audience perception across different registers.

3-4 days

Multiple Lenses: Introduction to Literary Criticism

Students learn that a literary text does not have a single 'correct' meaning waiting to be found — it can be productively read through multiple critical lenses. This unit introduces reader-response, historical-biographical, and feminist criticism as frameworks that reveal different aspects of texts.

3-4 days

The Play's the Thing: Introduction to Drama

Students encounter drama as a literary form with its own conventions — performance, dialogue, staging, and spectacle — and are introduced to Shakespeare through the lens of theatrical experience. Key dramatic devices including soliloquy, aside, and dramatic irony are examined as tools of audience engagement.

3-4 days

Navigating the Information Landscape

Students develop critical frameworks for evaluating digital sources, identifying misinformation and visual manipulation, understanding how algorithms shape the information they receive, and reading visual rhetoric and advertising with the same analytical skills they bring to written texts.

3-4 days

Finding Your Voice: Speaking and Listening Skills

Students develop the speaking and listening skills central to academic and civic life — including formal public speaking, active listening, Socratic seminar participation, and structured debate. The unit treats voice not as a performance skill but as a thinking tool.

3-4 days

Bringing It Together: Synthesis and Portfolio

Students complete the course by synthesizing ideas across the texts and skills they have encountered, assembling a portfolio of their best work, and practicing the metacognitive reflection that transforms experience into lasting learning. The unit makes explicit the connections between reading, writing, speaking, and thinking.

3-4 days

Learning Progression

This course is designed to be taken sequentially. Earlier units establish foundational concepts that later units build upon. While you can explore units in any order, following the numbered sequence provides the most coherent learning experience.