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Sample Performance Tasks for Stories and Poetry

Make connections between the visual presentation of John Tenniel’s illustrations in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the text of the story to identify how the pictures of Alice reflect specific descriptions of her in the text. [RL.4.7]

• Explain the selfish behavior by Mary and make inferences regarding the impact of the cholera outbreak in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden by explicitly referring to details and examples from the text. [RL.4.1]

• Describe how the narrator’s point of view in Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion influences how events are described and how the reader perceives the character of Alexander Ramsay, Jr. [RL.5.6]

• Summarize the plot of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and then reflect on the challenges facing the characters in the story while employing those and other details in the text to discuss the value of inquisitiveness and exploration as a theme of the story. [RL.5.2]

Read Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting and describe in-depth the idyllic setting of the story, drawing on specific details in the text, from the color of the sky to the sounds of the pond, to describe the scene. [RL.4.3]

• Compare and contrast coming-of-age stories by Christopher Paul Curtis (Bud, Not Buddy) and Louise Erdrich (The Birchbark House) by identifying similar themes and examining the stories’ approach to the topic of growing up. [RL.5.9]

• Refer to the structural elements (e.g., verse, rhythm, meter) of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” when analyzing the poem and contrasting the impact and differences of those elements to a prose summary of the poem. [RL.4.5]

• Determine the meaning of the metaphor of a cat in Carl Sandburg’s poem “Fog” and contrast that figurative language to the meaning of the simile in William Blake’s “The Echoing Green.” [RL.5.4]