Unit on Courage/Facing Adversity:

1. Mother and Daughter by Gary Soto short story (example of hardship thats not that
badsomething that middle schoolers could relate to)
2. Overcoming Obstacles: What Oprah Winfrey Learned From a Childhood of Abuse news
article with multiple reading levels from Newsela
http://www.learningliftoff.com/overcoming-obstacles-what-oprah-winfrey-learned-from-
her-abusive-childhood/
3. **War by Luigi Pirandello short story http://web.mit.edu/alam/Public/weblog/War.htm
(multiple men arguing over who is the most grief-stricken about the death of their sons)
4. **A Mystery of Heroism by Stephen Crane short story
http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415537070/data/section2/crane-mystery.pdf
(military story about soldiers in the battlefield, one encourages Fred to go into no mans
land)
5. **The Princess and the Puma by O Henry short story
http://www.classicreader.com/book/649/1/ (Josepha, princess of a large ranch, and Ripley,
a ranch foreman, have an encounter with a Mexican lion)
6. **American Born Chinese by Geun Luang
7. http://33.media.tumblr.com/e716227d875bc167319b966452496e0d/tumblr_n9aly10zgA1
qag2pzo1_1280.jpg (The Rose by Lang Leav) poem
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekLpn4zKiNU (The Inspirational Story of 9 yr old
Ezra Frech, paraplegic) video
9. Hold Me Down by Halsey song
10. https://s3.amazonaws.com/lowres.cartoonstock.com/money-banking-car-adversity-
admiration-economic_downturn-debt_collector-njun711_low.jpg cartoon
11. The Giver, Lois Lowry novel

**Starred stories are stories students could use for their final summative assessment