Teacher Commentary

I purposefully leave this activity open for students to brainstorm whatever aspects of life come to mind from the texts. Students will say a lot of things that overlap (i.e. farming, food) and I will record all of their ideas. Then later we go through the list and cluster ideas together into categories. These categories can range from religion to survival to family to beauty, etc. I then introduce and define the terms social and economic and we put their generated categories in either of those buckets. I focus on these two categories of interpretive frameworks because the text set lends itself to them and because they are frameworks that middle school students can understand. Just having students put things into these categories is a stepping stone to moving in to using these frameworks as a basis for interpretation in later grades.