Language Arts Rationale

In the language arts portion of this unit, many of the language arts standards will be met. Both academic and social developmental needs of students will be addressed in exploring the area of identity. In the novel Holes, the boys are sent to Camp Green Lake to build character. In all of the Language arts activities, the students will be working on building and understanding  the main characters, as well as how they relate to the other characters in the book. Character reflection will also take place in the cooperation among peers. There will be many opportunities to work with partners and groups, and opportunities to contribute to the project as a member for the benefit of the whole group.

The content standards addressed in the English Language Arts unit allow the students to relate character, setting and plot to real-life situations. They will be able to generate and organize ideas using a variety of planning strategies and use technology to produce multimedia works for presentations before their peers and to communicate this acquired information for a specific purpose. They will be able to make connections (text to text, text to life and text to world) with the book Holes because this book is full of adventure and “it doesn’t take long to realize that there’s more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake.” (Holes, 1998)

By using this book for an integrated unit on exploring identity, the students will become more aware of cultural diversity, and will be more accepting of differences when they experience working in teams. This will reinforce our goal of creating a productive community of learners and hopefully a group that will become contributing members of society.