Read this excerpt from We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Children’s March.After she graduated from Washington Elementary, where she was a drum majorette in the marching band, Arnetta moved on to Ullman High School. In tenth grade, she and seven friends started the Peace Ponies, a social and savings club. Members volunteered to help younger students and saved their money to give to needy families. In early April 1963, the Peace Ponies went to a mass meeting at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the sermon that night.What does this characterization of Arnetta reveal?
Read this excerpt from We’ve Got a Job.At that moment, nine-year-old Audrey made a decision. She would no longer just attend meetings. Somehow, she would act on her own.Which of Audrey’s character traits is best highlighted in this excerpt?
Which detail from “Pakistan’s Malala” best expresses how the setting influenced the residents of Swat Valley?
Read this excerpt from We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Children’s March.Then, in 1958, when he was nine, his mother got a job as a dental assistant – and a raise. At about the same time, Wash got a job, too. Six days a week for eight years, he woke up by four o'clock in the morning to deliver milk. By the time he got to school each day, he'd already put in almost half a day's work.How does this excerpt help readers make a personal connection to the story?
Read this paragraph.Curtis sat in the third row with his mother and father. They were quiet and reverential as the concert began. Occasionally, Curtis bowed his head as if in thought. When they stood at intermission, he took his mother’s arm and held her hand.Which statement describes the narrative voice of this paragraph?
Read this excerpt from We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Children’s March.Wash remembers the police as "the ultimate terror . . . You saw the police, you ran. It was automatic." Why were the police so frightening? "It was a rare weekend passed," Wash said, "that one or two folk . . . didn't get killed by the police . . . This is what they'd do to you: They'd call you and make you stick your head in the window [of the police car] . . . and then they would roll the window up . . . And then they'd hit you on your head . . . They'd beat people to death." As a result, he said, parents could scare unruly children into minding them by threatening, "The police gonna get you."What is the tone of the excerpt?
Read this excerpt from We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Children’s March.Just before fourth grade, Arnetta asked to switch to public school so she could be with her neighborhood friends. Her parents preferred that she and her sisters stay at St. Mary's but, Arnetta said, "We had a fit." Which part of the narrative structure does the author develop in this excerpt?
Read this excerpt from We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Children’s March.As a little boy, Wash spotted flashes of other worlds – neighborhoods where middle-class blacks like Audrey lived, and even fancier ones "over the mountain" in Mountain Brook, where his mother worked as a maid for a wealthy white family. "There would be times when we would go riding with somebody we knew that had a car. We would ride through Titusville or over to Mountain Brook. So, we knew that there was something better than the house that we lived in."How does this excerpt help readers make a personal connection to the story?
Read this paragraph.When the curtain closed, I breathed a sigh of relief. "We did it!” I exclaimed to Riya, knowing she would be equally thrilled. I wiped the sweat from my brow and prepared to take a bow when the curtain reopened. The thundering applause of the audience suggested that it approved.Which statement describes the narrative voice of this paragraph?
Read this excerpt from We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Children’s March."It was a rare weekend passed," Wash said, "that one or two folk... didn't get killed by the police . . . This is what they'd do to you: They'd call you and make you stick your head in the window [of the police car] . . . and then they would roll the window up . . . And then they'd hit you on your head . . . They'd beat people to death." As a result, he said, parents could scare unruly children into minding them by threatening, "The police gonna get you."If a student compares this excerpt to the cruelty of Nazi leaders, which type of connection is made?
Read this excerpt from We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Children’s March.Although life was better in the projects than in the tenement house, Wash began to glimpse more of the other world and realize what he was missing. "You'd walk by the Alabama Theatre, and the door would open, and you'd feel that cool air." He also noticed white people eating at the counter at J. J. Newberry's Department Store. "More than anything," he said, "I wanted a banana split behind that counter . . . But you couldn't go back there." Instead Wash and other blacks had to eat in the basement standing up.How does this excerpt best help readers make a connection to world events?
Read the excerpt from “Pakistan’s Malala.”But this was not how Malala decided she would live. With the encouragement of her father, she began believing that she was stronger than the things that scared her."The Taliban have repeatedly targeted schools in Swat," she wrote in an extraordinary blog when she was empowered to share her voice with the world by the BBC.She was writing around the time the Taliban issued a formal edict in January 2009 banning all girls from schools. On the blog, she praised her father, who was operating one of the few schools that would go on to defy that order.Which sentence best expresses Malala’s viewpoint?
Read this excerpt from We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Children’s March.Washington Elementary, which James and Wash also attended, was a shock to her. All of the teachers were black. The classes were more crowded, and the classrooms were less well equipped than those at St. Mary's.In addition, she had a long walk to school. Every day, she passed by Elyton Elementary, the white school that was closer to her home. "My father would always say, ‘One day, black children will be able to go to Elyton.’" Arnetta wasn’t sure she believed that would ever happen.How does the author use third-person narration in this excerpt?
Read this excerpt about Angel Island, an immigration station in the 1900s.The isolation and despair that everyone felt at Angel Island were expressed in the poetry that detainees carved into the walls of the buildings. The majority of these were written by the Chinese. Here is an example:Nights are long and the pillow cold; who can pity my loneliness? After experiencing such loneliness and sorrow,Why not just return home and learn to plow the fields?
Read this excerpt about Angel Island, an immigration station in the 1900s.Located in San Francisco Bay in northern California, Angel Island opened in 1910 to process a wave of European immigrants expected to come through the Panama Canal. But when World War I began, the wave never came.However, immigration from across the Pacific Ocean rose thanks to crises around the world. These included the civil war in Mexico, the Russian Revolution, the massacre of Armenians, the Japanese invasion of China, and worldwide effects of the Great Depression. More than half the immigrants came from China or Japan. In spite of the odds, America still offered the hope for a better future.Angel Island was called the “Ellis Island of the West.” But from the start, it was more like a detention center than an immigration center. The roughly one million immigrants entering the United States through Angel Island were processed but not welcomed.
Read this excerpt about Angel Island, an immigration station in the 1900s."They grilled us incessantly day after day,” said Don Kingman, a Chinese man who was, in fact, born in Oakland, California. At the age of five, his family moved to Hong Kong. But when he returned at age eighteen, he was sent through Angel Island. "They asked insignificant questions which were significant for them. How many steps do you have in front of your house? What did your mother have for breakfast? What is the name of your grandmother?”
Read this excerpt about Angel Island, an immigration station in the 1900s.Entry into the United States was most difficult for the Chinese. In part, Angel Island was built to enforce laws that restricted Chinese immigration. Such laws as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 were written out of prejudice and fear that Chinese workers were taking jobs away from European Americans. Around 30 percent of Chinese immigrants at Angel Island were forced to return to China.The rest, those who could prove they had a husband or father who was a US citizen, were allowed to enter the mainland United States.
Read this excerpt from "The Spirit of Alcatraz."The name Alcatraz makes people all over the world think of the infamous prison that used to be there. But the small island in the San Francisco Bay has a different meaning for many American Indians, who see it as a symbol of freedom.
Read this excerpt from "The Spirit of Alcatraz."As the months passed, the occupation began to lose some of its momentum, and several occupiers left the island to return to school or family life. Things became more difficult when the government cut off phone service to the island, followed by electrical power and fresh water.Finally, on June 11, 1971, a large force of government agents arrived on Alcatraz and removed the last fifteen people – six men, four women, and five children. After nineteen months, the occupation was over.
Read this excerpt from The Spirit of Alcatraz.Demonstrators first started coming to Alcatraz after the US government closed the prison in 1963 and declared the property "surplus federal land.” Officials wanted to sell the island to a private developer, but some American Indian leaders had other ideas. They pointed out that a treaty between the United States and the Sioux said all abandoned federal land should be returned to Native people.The first group of American Indian protestors arrived in March 1964 and occupied Alcatraz for four hours. The small group of Sioux demonstrators offered to pay the US government $9.40 for the island, or 47 cents per acre – the same amount the government was paying to use tribal lands.Activists decided to state a larger action five years later, after the federal government offered to turn Alcatraz into a national park. On the morning of November 20, 1969, seventy-nine American Indians, many of them college students, set off for the island and began their occupation.
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