© 2014 Amplify Education, Inc. All trademarks and copyrights are the property of Amplify or its licensors.

Amplify 55 Washington St., Suite 900 Brooklyn, NY 11201 212.796.2200

8th Grade Quest Summaries with CCSS Alignments

© 2014 Amplify Education, Inc. All trademarks and copyrights are the property of Amplify or its licensors. | 1

Amplify ELA Quests, Grade 8

A Quest is a series of lessons that uses the language of games and adventure to motivate students to read a

text closely and to write about it more expressively. Each Quest is different, based on the individual core text

that students are reading, but each unfolds as an original long-form narrative that plunges students deeper

into the text and envelops them in its historical context.

In this immersive environment, Quests harness students’ curiosity and competitive drive and compel them

toward a specific goal. When students study the works of Edgar Allan Poe, for example, the Quest plays out

as a macabre murder mystery which teams of students must solve. During the Quest they read fascinating

primary source documents while a variety of other elements—such as music, cartoons, photographs, and

interactive tablet experiences—create a multimedia adventure that doesn’t feel like school.

In addition, the collaborative nature of Quests raises the stakes for individual students, who must rise to the

challenge of the material they’re studying to help their teams succeed. During a Quest, students may be

asked to inform the rest of the class of the contents of source documents. Students also learn the meanings

of vocabulary words from context and pass those meanings on to their peers. Discussing their thoughts and

impressions and sharing their insights with their classmates are fundamental components of these special

lessons. Quests are learning experiences, but at the same time they provide opportunities for students to

teach.

While exercising core skills, Quests provide an opportunity for students to master difficult texts in a way that

is dynamic, empowering, and fun!

Unit B: Fiction and DramaChicago in Black, White and Blues

Chicago in Black, White and Blues is based on Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. This Quest

allows students to explore the characters’ “offstage” lives as they might have been lived in the context of

mid-20th century Chicago. Thereby, it places role-playing students inside a seminal period in the struggle

for civil rights and deepens their understanding of Hansberry’s passionate and vivid characters as well as of

African American history.

Through their tablets, students roam Chicago’s

South Side from the 1940s to the 1960s, seeing

scenes that the Younger family might have

encountered in their daily lives, and meeting

African American poets, writers, and civil rights

activists who might have inspired the Youngers

in their search for identity. For example, students

might see a street similar to one in which Travis

might have played; a whites-only neighborhood

like Clybourne Park, where Mama wanted to

buy a house; or the university where ambitious

students like Beneatha might have studied.

The scenes are archival photos, historical

documents, and videos that students can

explore and interact with as they would a

point-and-click video game. For example, a student participating in the Quest as a college student can

Examining photographs and multimedia, students take a virtual walk

through the neighborhoods and into the homes of Chicago’s South

Side, the setting of A Raisin in the Sun.

© 2014 Amplify Education, Inc. All trademarks and copyrights are the property of Amplify or its licensors. | 2

click on a photograph of a campus protest and see a clip of

writer and activist James Baldwin explaining the emergence

of a distinctly African identity among contemporary blacks.

Baldwin helps students better understand the tension between

Beneatha (who rejects the identity forced on her ancestors

by their owners) and her brother Walter (who longs only to

be a successful, respected businessman, like the young white

movers and shakers he sees downtown).

Besides several conversations with Baldwin, archival material

includes Lorraine Hansberry describing her relationship with

her dad, who brought a civil lawsuit against restrictive housing

laws to the US Supreme Court; and contemporary video and

audio recordings of, among others, Angela Davis, Martin Luther

King, and Malcolm X.

During the Quest, students hunt for these primary source

documents hidden in the app, take detailed notes on them,

write about them, and report on their contents to their partners

or in small groups. Each student finds three documents on his or her own, but each hears about many

more from classmates. Ultimately, students write a final composition about the history of the Civil Rights

Movement based on the materials they’ve come to know so well during the Quest. At the end of the Quest,

students will sit together and discuss the events of their day like a family at dinner, each “bringing to the

table” the perspective the Quest has helped them understand.

Common Core (CCSS) Alignments: Literacy.W.8.1b, W.8.2, W.8.2a, W.8.7, W.8.9a, SL.8.5, RL.89

Unit C: Poetry and Short StoriesWho Killed Edgar Allan Poe?

Who Killed Edgar Allan Poe? offers a fun, suspenseful way for students to explore the world of Edgar Allan

Poe’s gothic poetry and short stories while applying critical reading and writing skills.

The Quest is a mystery—a

whodunit: the eccentric Edgar

Allan Poe has been murdered,

and students must figure out who

did him in. They participate in

the Quest as one of Poe’s critics,

Mark Twain or Rufus Griswold, or

as one of his famous characters:

Lenore, Annabel Lee, the Raven,

the murderer from “The Tell-Tale

Heart,” Montresor from “The Cask

of Amontillado,” the Red Death

incarnate, or Auguste Dupin from

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

Each character must investigate

the crime scene and interrogate the other characters in order to find and interpret clues and to ultimately

Four different ways to explore the world reveal four

different perspectives on the plight of the Younger

family.

Poe himself introduces the Quest and the fact that he was just murdered—by one of his

own characters no less.

© 2014 Amplify Education, Inc. All trademarks and copyrights are the property of Amplify or its licensors. | 3

solve the mystery. The Quest is also loosely based on Poe’s real-life mysterious death, which to this day has

not been explained.

Who Killed Edgar Allan Poe? allows students to apply their close reading skills and practice “CSI” on a textual

level, also known as scholarly research, while they explore the peculiar, haunted characters from Edgar

Allan Poe’s world. Students also analyze new pieces of non-fiction writing (specifically, Mark Twain’s and

Rufus Griswold’s actual scathing reviews of Poe’s work), as well as the fabricated material dreamed up by

Quest creators for the characters, including “police reports” of the crime scene. The Quest encourages each

student to relate personally to the material by giving his or her character appropriate attributes, vocabulary,

and even costumes or props. The final challenge for each student is to draft and read aloud a detailed

“accusation”—naming the “killer” of Edgar Allan Poe and describing his or her motive and modus operandi—

using details and clues discovered from each round of the Quest.

The Quest reinforces students’ knowledge of the material they’ve read during the unit and encourages them

to revisit those texts by showing them that they can always discover new details in a text if they look closely

and carefully.

Common Core (CCSS) Alignments: Literacy.RI.8.1, RI.8.2, RI.8.3, RI.8.4, RI.8.6, W.8.1, W.8.2, W.8.4, RL.8.5,

SL.8.4

Two-sided cards, given out in every round, help guide the characters through the game. Here, Team

Lenore learns where she was when Poe was killed, and that she might be linked to a suspicious key.

LENORE

CHAPTER IIBRING THIS TO

THE GROUP'S ATTENTION:

I know that Edgar Allan Poe and Rufus Griswold came to blows several times at various lectures they attended together. After reading the obituary, I think I know why. It doesn’t look like Griswold held Poe in particularly high esteem.

WHERE WERE YOU WHEN POE DIED?

I was in the Violet Room. The Raven was with me, and he was sitting on a bust of Pallas; you can ask him. We were together all night except for 15 minutes when I slipped into the hall around 9:45 PM.

The last time I saw Poe was last night. We had a pleasant conversation.

IF SOMEONE ASKS YOU ABOUT A KEY:

I do have a key—an extra key. Hopefully it will give us some new information.

(Hand over the key to the first person that asks you about it.)