27.3. from "Barrio Boy," Open-Ended Questions, and Using Ellipses Well L2.b, W1.b.

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What Are We Doing Today:
We're practicing answering an open-ended question with good evidence (explicitly stated or should be concluded level), a skill that we've gone over. (CCSS Standard W1.b., which asks that you answer question and cite evidence that shows that you understand a topic or text, though this is also RL1.).
We're also going to make sure that we choose a quotation to support that needs some off-topic parts excised, and we'll use an ellipsis to legally indicated that we haven't quoted word for word. (L2.c.)




Things We Need to Know:
1. We went over the four levels of proof when we're trying to see if some said or thought about a text is true: explicitly stated, should be concluded, should not be concluded, and explicitly contradicted).
2. We use these to prove our own answers to open-ended questions. However, instead of finding proof for other people's analyses, we subject our own ideas to this testing. Then we write down Text Citation Proving Sentences for the explanation and the examples.
3. Choose a full sentence as part of your proof, but you almost never need the whole sentence. Pick the word out that you don't need.
4. Use the ellipsis [ . . . ] to indicate that you have omitted some words.

The Text

We're starting to talk about the ideas of parents, families, and home - here's an excerpt from the longer memoir Barrio Boy, which can help us explore these ideas.

The Product

The narrator in this excerpt from Barrio Boy feels a great deal of trepidation* starting a new school.

• How do the boy's feelings about the school change from the beginning to the end of the piece? How does the author show this?
• What about the school causes the boy's feelings to alter*?

How Will Know When We're Doing This Well?
I'll assess these on the NJ Holistic Scoring rubric for open-ended questions with a 1-2-3-4 grade.
For today's subskill, the ellipsis, you'll be emerging if you do it all, proficient if you select a reasonable sentence to cut from, and expert if you do that and trim out all of the extraneous words.

* "trepidation" means "fear or anxiety because something may happen."
* "alter" is a sophisticated word that simply means "change" -- you can see the same root, "alt," in "alternate," "alternative," and the "alt" button on a computer keyboard, which if you hold it down let you change the keys' functions.