About This Lesson
This unit examines a selection of essays, poems, and plays produced by Black writers in the early 1900s. Most of the works students will read in this unit were produced either by people who lived and took part in the artistic flourishing in Harlem, New York, or by keen observers of the movement. In terms of literary skills, students will focus on analyzing the themes and ideas of an artistic movement and how they are expressed in a variety of texts. Students will also identify and analyze the central ideas and argumentative structure of nonfiction essays. Throughout the unit, students will be asked to make judgments about how the texts they read reflect different ideas, themes, and aspects of the Harlem Renaissance.
In this unit, students will be exposed to content-area vocabulary and words derived from Greek and Latin roots amo, erro, facio, fragilis, finis, and neos. Students will work on grammar skills involving eliminating wordiness and redundancy in their writing and distinguish between frequently confused words. Students will plan, write, edit and publish a multimedia report about a person, place, concept, movement, or event of the Harlem Renaissance.
Students will read selections from The Genius of the Harlem Renaissance which is the first volume of a two-part reader. This first volume contains readings, with a few exceptions, from the first part of the Harlem Renaissance (1915 – 1926). As the 20th century approached, Black creatives made substantial contributions to America’s cultural lifeblood. Their works were signs of things to come and set the stage for the expressive explosion of literature and art we now know as the Harlem Renaissance. Each passage will include brief biographies of their authors, as well as information about the historic events that were happening at the time they were produced written by the Reader’s editor, Dr. Andrea Oliver
