De Paul University: Center for Urban Education: My Sister, the Soldier [Pdf]

"My Sister, the Soldier" is a one page, fictional, reading passage about a boy and his mother who are worried about his sister who was a soldier in Iraq. [Contains some mechanical errors; students could find and correct.] It is followed by open-ended questions which require students to provide evidence from the story; it includes: determining the main idea and explaining how they know it is the main idea using evidence from the text. This passage aligns with Common Core Anchor Reading Standards 1 requiring close reading, inference, textual evidence, and main idea.