English 10 Honors Course Description, Purpose, and Enduring Understandings
Curriculum/Content Area: Language Arts
Course Length: Semester
Course Title: English 10 Honors
Date last reviewed:
Prerequisites: English 9
Board approval date:
Course description and purpose: Honors English 10 focuses on further developing students’ reading, writing, and critical
thinking skills using prose (fiction and nonfiction), poetry, and dramatic works. Readings in the class range from classic texts
to recent news articles, along with an independently chosen reading component. Throughout the semester, students will be
exposed to works of greater complexity than offered in the general English 10 course; they will also be expected to read more
on a daily basis. While progressing through these texts, students will, in weekly writing assignments and occasional quizzes,
revisit language arts skills from past courses and be introduced to new content in preparation for the ACT, Advanced
Placement Language and Composition, and Advanced Placement Literature and Composition.
Enduring Understandings (EUs):
Essential Questions (EQs):
Students will understand that . . .
1. Changes in people, places, ideas, events, and
entertainment alter behavior, thoughts, and
feelings.
2.Journalistic writing includes a variety of formats
and typically provides a reliable, concise source of
information.
3.Complex sentence structures and advanced
punctuation usage allows for more concise
communication.
4. The study of world myths and legends provides
insight into human nature and a basis for
understanding common allusions.
5. The analysis of poetry improves vocabulary
knowledge and the recognition of many common
rhetorical strategies.
6. Our media environment, especially in terms of
information technology today, as a key source of
popular culture, reflects and shapes our morals
and ethics.
7. A given work’s theme, determined by noticing
repetition along with the emphasis resulting from
various literary devices, serves as one basis for
judging and describing a text.
8. The classical model for an argumentative essay
allows the writer to work more quickly while
meeting the expectations of an educated reader.
9. Historical fiction must balance entertaining and
engaging the modern reader while maintaining, to
a certain extent, historical accuracy.
10. Writing historical fiction forces a person to
think critically about the past and present.
1. How will analyzing a wide variety of narrative,
biographical, and auto- biographical texts from
different times in history help me understand the
human experience?
2.How can the purpose, language, and structure
of journalistic writing be used to improve the
research process?
3. How does the correct use of various clauses
and phrases, along with colons, and semicolons,
allow writing to be both more engaging and more
accurate?
4. How can themes and archetypes from and
allusions to myths and legends increase one’s
understanding of the present?
5.What makes poetry relevant to a modern
reader?
6.What conclusions can I draw about the human
experience from reading multiple texts about a
common topic?
7. How does an author use various literary
devices to support theme in literature?
8. Why should argumentative essays be
structured in such formulaic ways?
9. How does reading historical fiction change my
perspective about history?
10. In what ways did people of the past not only
behave differently but also view the world in
fundamentally different ways?