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English I - ELL
Week 3
English I, Week 3
The Power of the Omniscient Narrator
Week 3 Task 1: Activity 4.7 p. 479-482 (~50 min)
• Complete the “Opening Writing Prompt” on p. 479 (5 min)
• Read the “About the Author” on p. 479 (2-3 min)- conduct on the spot research to
learn more about Anthony Doerr
• Using the “As You Read” prompt on p. 479, read from All the Light we Cannot
See on p. 480 (10 min)
• Complete the “Making Observations” box on p. 480 (5 min).
• Complete the “Working with the Text” graphic organizer on p. 481 (15 min).
• Answer the questions for “Check Your Understanding” & “Appreciating the Power
of the Omniscient Narrator” p. 482. (10 min)
Week 3 Task 2: Activity 4.8 p. 483-489 (~45 min)
• Read the excerpt from All the Light We Cannot See on p. 483 and answer the
opening writing prompt on p.483 (10 min).
• Using the “As You Read” prompt on p. 484, read the novel excerpt from All the
Light we Cannot See on p. 485-487 (15 min)
• Answer the two “Making Observation” Questions on p. 487 (5 min)
• Complete the “Working with the Text” graphic organizer on p. 488 (15 min)
• Complete the “Appreciating the Author’s Craft” & “Check your Understanding”
questions on p. 489 (10 min)
Week 3 Task 3: Activity 4.9 p. 490-491 (~30 min)
• Read “Writing to Sources: Informational Text” prompt on p. 490 (5 min)
• Using the “Writing to Sources: Informational Text” prompt, complete the “Writing
a Character Analysis Paragraph” p. 491 (25 min)
!
Use Google to find more information and
section
All The Light We Cannot
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Unit 4 • Powerful Openings 479
ACTIVITY
As You Read
• Underline clues to the novel’s setting and historical context.
• Circle unfamiliar words or phrases. Try to determine the meaning of the words
by using context clues, word parts, or a dictionary.
The Power of the Omniscient Narrator
4.7
Learning Targets
• Analyze the setting of a novel based on its opening paragraphs.
• Conduct research to examine the setting of a novel.
• Visualize the setting of a novel.
Preview
In this activity, you will read an excerpt from the beginning of All the Light
We Cannot See and then explore its setting and narrative perspective.
Learning Strategies
Close Reading
Graphic Organizer
Predicting
My Notes
Opening Writing Prompt
Read the first two paragraphs from the opening of All the Light We Cannot
See by Anthony Doerr, taking special notice of the words you sorted in the
previous activity. Then answer the following question.
Does anything about Doerr’s use of these words in the passage
surprise you? Explain your answer.
Anthony Doerr (b. 1973) is a fiction writer whose
stories often are set in places where he has lived
or spent a significant amount of time. Says Doerr,
“When you’re working lots every day, almost
everything you read or hear or see outside of
those hours becomes relevant [to your writing]
… the world starts to glow with pertinence.” For
example, while writing All the Light We Cannot
See, Doerr pulled inspiration from daily walks in
the areas inhabited by his characters, from trips to
the museum, from dozens of books on the period,
as well as from musical compositions by Claude Debussy, a famous composer
from the region. He is the author of both short stories and novels, and he has
received multiple awards for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize and the
Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American
Academy in Rome.
About the Author
Underline parts that tell you when and where the novel takes place.
Circle words that you do not know. Try looking at context clues (other words in
the sentence) or looking them up in a dictionary or the internet.
looking at the words you found and sorted in the
how the author uses the words you sorted
a section
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Novel
from
All the Light We
Cannot See
(Part 1)
by Anthony Doerr
7 August 1944
Leaets
1 At dusk they pour from the sky. ey blow across the ramparts, turn
cartwheels over rooops, utter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets
swirl with them, ashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the
inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.
2 e tide climbs. e moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the
rooops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a
half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of
mortars.
Bombers
3 ey cross the Channel at midnight. ere are twelve and they are named
for songs: Stardust and Stormy Weather and In the Mood and Pistol-Packin’
Mama. e sea glides along far below, spattered with the countless chevrons of
whitecaps. Soon enough, the navigators can discern the low moonlit lumps of
islands ranged along the horizon.
4 France.
5 Intercoms crackle. Deliberately, almost lazily, the bombers shed altitude.
reads of red light ascend from anti-air emplacements up and down the coast.
Dark, ruined ships appear, scuttled or destroyed, one with its bow shorn away,
a second ickering as it burns. On an outermost island, panicked sheep run
zigzagging between rocks.
6 Inside each airplane, a bombardier peers through an aiming window and
counts to twenty. Four ve six seven. To the bombardiers, the walled city on its
granite headland, drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something
black and dangerous, a nal abscess to be lanced away.
ramparts: walls
discern: identify or detect
My Notes
Making Observations
• What is happening in this excerpt?
• What mood is the author building?
section?
What is the mood of the story?
© 2021 College Board. All rights reserved.
Unit 4 • Powerful Openings 481
4.7
Working from the Text
Internet or other resources to help you interpret each clue.
Clues Assumptions or Research Findings
Example: "flashing white
against the cobbles"
Cobbles are a certain way to
build roads.
Example: This story happened many years ago.
This is an old way to make roads.Today roads
are smooth and not made like this.
From the directions above, use the parts of the story you underlined to tell you when and where a story
is taking place. Explain them in the graph below. Why is what your underlined important to help you figure
out when the story happened? Write the part you underlined in the "clues" side and explain why you picked
it in the "assumptions side.
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English Language Arts English I
4.7
Check Your Understanding
Write a detailed sentence that summarizes your assumptions and findings about
the setting of Doerr’s novel opening.
Appreciating the Power of the Omniscient Narrator
Discuss the following questions with your classmates.
• Imagine you are a filmmaker who is trying to decide how best to represent the
opening paragraphs of Doerr’s novel in a movie. What visual images would you
need to capture and from what perspectives would you need to film them?
•
VOCABULARY
LITERARY
An omniscient narrator
is a narrator that has the
power to be all-seeing and,
therefore, all-knowing,
as the word’s etymology
implies: omni (meaning
“all”) plus scient (meaning
“knowing/knowledge”).
VOCABULARY
My Notes
Write a sentence that tells when you think this story happened. What is your
evidence it happened at this time?
How would you film it?
What would it look like? What point of view would it be from?
Thinking about how you would film the opener to "All the Light We Cannot See",
what does this tell you about what all the third-person omniscient narrator can
do? Do you get a lot of information or only a little? Is it the best perspective to
tell a story in? Why? (look at the pink vocabulary box if you need help)
© 2021 College Board. All rights reserved.
Unit 4 • Powerful Openings 483
4.8
The Omniscient Narrator as Mind Reader
from
All the Light We Cannot See
6 Inside each airplane, a bombardier peers through an aiming window and
counts to twenty. Four ve six seven. To the bombardiers, the walled city on its
granite headland, drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something
black and dangerous, a nal abscess to be lanced away.
e Girl
7 In a corner of the city, inside a tall, narrow house at Number 4 rue
Vauborel, on the sixth and highest oor, a sightless sixteen-year-old named
Marie-Laure LeBlanc kneels over a low table covered entirely with a model.
e model is a miniature of the city she kneels within, and contains scale
replicas of the hundreds of houses and shops and hotels within its walls.
ere’s the cathedral with its perforated spire, and the bulky old Château de
Saint-Malo, and row aer row of seaside mansions studded with chimneys. A
slender wooden jetty arcs out from a beach called the Plage du Môle; a delicate,
reticulated atrium vaults over the seafood market; minute benches, the smallest
no larger than apple seeds, dot the tiny public squares.
Learning Targets
• Analyze characters from a novel.
• Understand the role of an omniscient narrator in a novel.
Preview
In this activity, you will read and discuss a continuation of the opening
of All the Light We Cannot See, in which you are introduced to two of the
novel’s main characters.
Opening Writing Prompt
Read the following excerpt from the opening of All the Light We Cannot See,
which includes the final paragraph from “Bombers,” a section you read
previously, and the first paragraph of the “The Girl,” a section you will read
later in this activity. Then answer the following question.
Saint-Malo differ?
Learning Strategies
Close Reading
Graphic Organizer
Predicting
My Notes
ACTIVITY
section
How are the two perspectives or view-points of the
French walled city different?
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4.8
Relating Language to Characterization
1. Write a sentence explaining how the two depictions of Saint-Malo serve to characterize the
bombardiers and Marie-Laure. Use the sentence frame to help you.
Ironically, Marie-Laure is able to see Saint-Malo as
whereas the bombardiers see Saint-Malo as .
As You Read
• Underline telling details about the characters of Marie-Laure and Werner.
• Circle unfamiliar words or phrases. Try to determine the meaning of the words by using context
clues, word parts, or a dictionary.
Aerial photograph of Saint-Malo, a French port in Brittany
descriptions
represent
Circle words you do not know.
© 2021 College Board. All rights reserved.
Unit 4 • Powerful Openings 485
4.8
Novel
from
All the Light We
Cannot See
(Part 2)
by Anthony Doerr
e Girl
7 In a corner of the city, inside a tall, narrow house at Number 4 rue
Vauborel, on the sixth and highest oor, a sightless sixteen-year-old named
Marie-Laure LeBlanc kneels over a low table covered entirely with a model.
e model is a miniature of the city she kneels within, and contains scale
replicas of the hundreds of houses and shops and hotels within its walls.
ere’s the cathedral with its perforated spire, and the bulky old Château de
Saint-Malo, and row aer row of seaside mansions studded with chimneys. A
slender wooden jetty arcs out from a beach called the Plage du Môle; a delicate,
reticulated atrium vaults over the seafood market; minute benches, the
smallest no larger than apple seeds, dot the tiny public squares.
8 Marie-Laure runs her ngertips along the centimeter-wide parapet
crowning the ramparts, drawing an uneven star shape around the entire model.
She nds the opening atop the walls where four ceremonial cannons point to
sea. “Bastion de la Hollande,” she whispers, and her ngers walk down a little
staircase. “Rue des Cordiers. Rue Jacques Cartier.”
9 In a corner of the room stand two galvanized buckets lled to the rim
with water. Fill them up, her great-uncle has taught her, whenever you can. e
bathtub on the third oor too. Who knows when the water will go out again.
10 Her ngers travel back to the cathedral spire. South to the Gate of Dinan.
All evening she has been marching her ngers around the model, waiting for
her great-uncle Etienne, who owns this house, who went out the previous night
while she slept, and who has not returned. And now it is night again, another
revolution of the clock, and the whole block is quiet, and she cannot sleep.
11 She can hear the bombers when they are three miles away. A mounting
static. e hum inside a seashell.
12 When she opens the bedroom window, the noise of the airplanes
becomes louder. Otherwise, the night is dreadfully silent: no engines, no voices,
no clatter. No sirens. No footfalls on the cobbles. Not even gulls. Just a high
tide, one block away and six stories below, lapping at the base of the city walls.
13 And something else.
14 Something rattling soly, very close. She eases open the le-hand shutter
and runs her ngers up the slats of the right. A sheet of paper has lodged there.
15 She holds it to her nose. It smells of fresh ink. Gasoline, maybe. e paper
is crisp; it has not been outside long.
reticulated: net-like
galvanized: zinc coated
My Notes
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My Notes
16 Marie-Laure hesitates at the window in her stocking feet, her bedroom
behind her, seashells arranged along the top of the armoire, pebbles along the
baseboards. Her cane stands in the corner; her big Braille novel waits facedown
on the bed. e drone of the airplanes grows.
e Boy
17 Five streets to the north, a white-haired eighteen-year-old German
private named Werner Pfennig wakes to a faint staccato hum. Little more than
a purr. Flies tapping at a far-o windowpane.
18 Where is he? e sweet, slightly chemical scent of gun oil; the raw wood
of newly constructed shell crates; the mothballed odor of old bedspreads—he’s
in the hotel. Of course. L’hôtel des Abeilles, the Hotel of Bees.
19 Still night. Still early.
20 From the direction of the sea come whistles and booms; ak is going up.
21 An anti-air corporal hurries down the corridor, heading for the stairwell.
“Get to the cellar,” he calls over his shoulder, and Werner switches on his eld
light, rolls his blanket into his duel, and starts down the hall.
22 Not so long ago, the Hotel of Bees was a cheerful address, with bright
blue shutters on its facade and oysters on ice in its café and Breton waiters in
bow ties polishing glasses behind its bar. It oered twenty-one guest rooms,
commanding sea views, and a lobby replace as big as a truck. Parisians on
weekend holidays would drink aperitifs here, and before them the occasional
emissary from the republic—ministers and vice ministers and abbots and
admirals—and in the centuries before them, windburned corsairs: killers,
plunderers, raiders, seamen.
23 Before that, before it was ever a hotel at all, ve full centuries ago, it was
the home of a wealthy privateer who gave up raiding ships to study bees in
the pastures outside Saint-Malo, scribbling in notebooks and eating honey
straight from combs. e crests above the door lintels still have bumblebees
carved into the oak; the ivy-covered fountain in the courtyard is shaped like a
hive. Werner’s favorites are ve faded frescoes on the ceilings of the grandest
upper rooms, where bees as big as children oat against blue backdrops, big
lazy drones and workers with diaphanous wings—where, above a hexagonal
bathtub, a single nine-foot-long queen, with multiple eyes and a golden-furred
abdomen, curls across the ceiling.
24 Over the past four weeks, the hotel has become something else: a
fortress. A detachment of Austrian anti-airmen has boarded up every window,
overturned every bed. ey’ve reinforced the entrance, packed the stairwells
with crates of artillery shells. e hotel’s fourth oor, where garden rooms with
French balconies open directly onto the ramparts, has become home to an
aging high-velocity anti-air gun called an 88 that can re twenty-one-and-a-
half-pound shells nine miles.
25 Her Majesty, the Austrians call their cannon, and for the past week these
men have tended to it the way worker bees might tend to a queen. ey’ve fed
staccato: sudden and short
diaphanous: delicate
Etymology
The word armoire, meaning “a
large wardrobe with doors and
shelves,” comes from a French
word that first appeared in
1570. The narrator’s use of this
word helps readers visualize
Marie-Laure’s bedroom in
a particular way, while also
reminding them of the story’s
setting, which is France.
WORD CONNECTIONS
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Unit 4 • Powerful Openings 487
4.8
her oils, repainted her barrel, lubricated her wheels; they’ve arranged sandbags
at her feet like oerings.
26 e royal acht acht, a deathly monarch meant to protect them all.
27 Werner is in the stairwell, halfway to the ground oor, when the 88 res
twice in quick succession. It’s the rst time he’s heard the gun at such close
range, and it sounds as if the top half of the hotel has torn o. He stumbles and
throws his arms over his ears. e walls reverberate all the way down into the
foundation, then back up.
28 Werner can hear the Austrians two oors up scrambling, reloading, and
the receding screams of both shells as they hurtle above the ocean, already two
or three miles away. One of the soldiers, he realizes, is singing. Or maybe it is
more than one. Maybe they are all singing. Eight Luwae men, none of whom
will survive the hour, singing a love song to their queen.
29 Werner chases the beam of his eld light through the lobby. e big gun
detonates a third time, and glass shatters somewhere close by, and torrents of
soot rattle down the chimney, and the walls of the hotel toll like a struck bell.
Werner worries that the sound will knock the teeth from his gums.
30 He drags open the cellar door and pauses a moment, vision swimming.
“is is it?” he asks. “ey’re really coming?”
31 But who is there to answer?
Making Observations
• Where is Marie-Laure when the bombing starts? Where is Werner?
• What is Her Majesty?
My Notes
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Working from the Text
2.
her essence. Then write quotes from the novel that support your analysis of each character.
Character Description Quotes from Text
Marie-Laure
Werner
Complete the graphic organizer below. What are the characters like? Find quotes
in the story to support your descriptions of the characters.
Examples: she pays
attention to detail.
Example: "The model is a miniature
of the city she kneels with", she made a
a perfect replica of her city.
© 2021 College Board. All rights reserved.
Unit 4 • Powerful Openings 489
4.8
Appreciating the Author’s Craft
Discuss the following questions with your classmates.
• Think about this quote about Marie-Laure from Doerr’s novel: “Something rattling softly, very
close. She eases open the left-hand shutter and runs her fingers up the slats of the right. A sheet
of paper has lodged there.” What is the paper? How do you know?
• Why does Doerr describe the leaflet as a “sheet of paper” when he tells about Marie-Laure
finding it?
Check Your Understanding
When Doerr uses the phrase “sheet of paper” in place of the term “leaflet,” what does he show
about how an omniscient narrator can function in a story?
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490 SpringBoard
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English Language Arts English I
4.9
Forming a Single-Paragraph Outline
Use the following single-paragraph outline to plan your character analysis.
1.
Marie-Laure’s or Werner’s character.
2. Develop the body of your paragraph by generating details that support your
claim. Be sure to include quotations from the novel, as well as your own
analysis that ties back to your claim.
3. Complete your outline by writing a concluding statement that relates the
evidence you’ve presented back to the claim.
Learning Targets
• Create a plan for writing a character analysis paragraph.
• Draft a character analysis paragraph.
Preview
In this activity, you will plan and write two character-analysis paragraphs
using quotes from the text and analysis that includes your own original
commentary.
Writing an Analysis of Argument:
Outlining and Drafting
Drafting
Outlining
Learning Strategies
My Notes
ACTIVITY
Write a character analysis paragraph in your Reader/Writer Notebook.
Be sure to:
• Choose a subject for your character analysis: either Marie-Laure or
Werner from All the Light We Cannot See.
• Include a topic sentence that makes a claim about the character you are
analyzing.
•
• Use quotation marks around words taken directly from the novel.
•
repeating it.
Writing to Sources: Informational Text
Have an opening
Give evidence and quotations to give support to your claim about the
character.
Have a closing sentence that restates your claim but is not the
same as your opening sentence.
Use your character graphic organizer and any story notes
to help draft an opening sentence for your paragraph.
Create your body sentences. These are the direct quotations or
explanations to give evidence to support your claims about the
character.
closing
© 2021 College Board. All rights reserved.
Unit 4 • Powerful Openings 491
4.9
Single-Paragraph Outline
T.S.
1.
2.
3.
4.
C.S.
Writing a Character Analysis Paragraph
4.
your claim with the most compelling quotations from the novel, use quotation marks correctly,
Assess and Reflect
Use the outline above to write your full paragraph below. Make sure to include quotation
marks around things you take directly from the story. Look back at your chart and notes
if you need extra help.
Now, write a paragraph for the character you did not originally choose. Make sure to go back and
find supporting evidence for your claims about the character. Follow the writing process for the
first paragraph and write the second one below.