Concordia University Nebraska Education Department Unit Plan Scaffold

Name: Payton DeMers-Sahling Grade Level: 8th

Topic/Central Focus: The Giver Course for which unit is developed:
English/Language Arts

Cumulative list of Standard(s) to be met in the Unit: (specific standards/ benchmarks

will be listed in each lesson)

LA 8.1.6.l Build background knowledge and activate prior knowledge to clarify text,
deepen understanding and make connections while reading complex text.

LA 8.1.5.b Select and apply knowledge of context clues (e.g., word, phrase, sentence,
and paragraph clues) and text features to determine meaning of unknown
words.
LA 8.1.5.c Acquire new academic and content-specific grade-level vocabulary, relate to
prior knowledge, and apply in new situations.

LA 8.1.6.g Cite specific textual evidence to analyze and make inferences based on the
characteristics of a variety of literary and informational texts.

LA 8.1.6.i Construct and/or answer literal, inferential, critical, and interpretive questions and
support answers with explicit evidence from the text or additional sources.
Unit Learning Targets
What will students know? What will students understand? What will students do?

The vocab specific to the
book’s community such as:
Assignment, Birthmother,
Capacity to See Beyond,
Caretaker of the Old,
Ceremony of Loss,
December Ceremony,
Elsewhere, The Giver
Literary devices such as:
Flashback, Foreshadowing,
Imagery, Symbolism, Theme,
Third-person limited narration
Definition and characteristics
of dystopias
Choices have power
Rules can keep us from
knowledge, and they can also
protect us, but we need to
have and understand why we
have rules while also realizing
that our choice in following
those rules has power.
Freedom can be scary
Identify the elements that make a
novel dystopian such as the type
of government, the roles people
play, and environment
Recognize euphemisms within the
book and determine what those
euphemisms really mean.
Identify and describe the changes
that Jonas goes through
throughout the novel
Identify and explain connections
between new ideas the book
provides and their current beliefs,
values and experiences.

Discuss the importance of rules

and how they impact a society.
Concordia University Nebraska Education Department Unit Plan Scaffold

Pre/Diagnostic Assessment: (What tools and procedures will be used to provide data
about what students know about the central focus and can do at the beginning of the
learning segment?)

Why do we have rules? – Question

You can answer this in one sentence or one word or a paragraph, but I just want you to be
thinking about this question.

Give this quiz:

1. What do you know about the author, Louis Lowry?

2. Have you ever been to a dystopia, which happens to be the setting in the novel? What do
you know about the setting?

3. The themes in the novel are memory, rules, and discovery. What do you know about the
theme(s) from previous books?

Summative Assessment: (What tools and procedures will be used to provide data to
demonstrate that the students met the Central Focus and objectives at the end of the
Learning Segment?)

The Unit Test is the overall summative assessment. I do have smaller formative assessments
throughout in 3 lessons included.

Describe how your summative assessment meets the unit learning targets:
(Justify and explain your assessment choices.)

The Unit Test picks apart certain aspects of the story as well as focuses on overall themes of
the book. I used this assessment because it asks students questions that I hope they learned
from the lessons in this Unit. This assessment gives students options to choose from, but also
requires them to think deeper on their own. Here, I will be able to see if each student met
the objectives because each question is tethered to a specific objective.