Gretchen Ertl for The New York TimesEach campaign is using social media as another means to reach voters, particularly younger ones, who may not watch television or read the paper but spend plenty of time on the social Web.Go to related article »

Each Friday we post three Common Core-aligned reading and writing tasksinspired by New York Times reporting and opinion pieces, and classroom-designed and tested by teachers Sarah Gross and Jonathan Olsen and their ninth grade humanities students.

This week, two of the prompts come from their classroom, and we’ve added a third of our own that uses The Times’s Room for Debate, an excellent resource for argumentative writing.

Note: The #art4me hashtag suggested in this feature last week is alive and well on Twitter. Learn more here, then join the conversation by posting a photo of the art in your life.

Common Core Practice Tasks | Week of Oct. 8-12, 2012

Argumentative Writing

Business: “Campaigns Use Social Media to Lure Younger Voters”
Common Core Standards: R1, RI10, W1, W4, W5, W10, RH5

Ever wonder what kind of music President Obama listens to, or how Ann Romney makes pumpkin bread?

You can find the answers to these questions on social media Web sites like Spotify and Pinterest. Presidential campaigns are implementing extensive efforts to capture the youth vote by posting huge amounts of information on the Internet. As the digital director for Mitt Romney’s campaign explains, “The more people you talk to, the more likely you are to win.”

Your Task: Think of the ways that you and your friends use social media. Do you tweet? Post on Facebook? Share on Tumblr or Pinterest? Determine the best method for the presidential campaigns to reach young voters and write a letter to the president or Governor Romney’s campaign explaining your viewpoint.

Before you do the task, you might …

• Explore the infographic “The Presidential Campaign on Social Media”
• Make a list of the social media Web sites that you use. Are the campaigns present on these sites?
• Visit the Web sites of both presidential candidates, President Obama andGovernor Romney. Determine if these Web sites are attracting young voters.

Extension Activity

Research local elections in your area and find out if candidates are using social media. Make a list of social media outreach being used by local candidates and present it to the rest of your class. Teachers can use a class Twitter account to follow candidates and students can analyze how their local elections might be influenced by social media outreach.

Argumentative Writing

Room for Debate: “Colleges, by the Numbers”
Common Core Standards: RI1, RI6, RI10, W1, W4, W10, RH4, RH5, RH8

Each year U.S. News and World Report publishes an update of its college rankings, and these rankings influence the decisions of students across the country and world. They also affect the policies made by college administrators, as many colleges jockey to increase their ranking.

The Times’s Room for Debate hosts six knowledgeable outside contributors who debate whether the college rankings are useful for students or too ...

Your Task: Do you think the college ranking system is a useful guide for students looking to find the right college, or do you think the rankings are too simplistic or misleading? Use the six Room for Debate opinion pieces to learn more about the issue and gather evidence on both sides, perhaps keeping track of what you find with this pro-con T-chart organizer (PDF).

Then, write your own opinion, making sure you to use evidence from the various opinion pieces to back up your position. (You may even want to rebut a counterclaim within your response to strengthen your argument.)

Before you do the task, you might….

• Visit U.S. News and World Report’s 2012 national university rankings.
• Read this article published by U.S. News explaining how the magazine calculates its annual rankings.
• Read the Times article “Gaming the College Rankings” about scandals and institutional lying related to the U.S. News rankings.

Extension Activity

Consider what information you think is most useful for high school students looking to find the right college. Design a better way to provide students with a useful guide to colleges and universities. What information would you include? How would you organize the colleges? How would you distinguish between different types of schools?

And for more on using Room for Debate in the classroom, see this Learning Network lesson plan.

Narrative Writing 
Dining infographic: “It Came From the Banana Room”
Common Core Standards: RI7, W3, W4, RST7, RH7

Ever wonder how many steps it takes for food to get delivered to your doorstep? The Times has created an infographic that explains how the food delivery company FreshDirect efficiently brings food ordered online to customers’ homes. Packaging takes place in a 300,000-square-foot warehouse in Long Island where 500 employees process orders. How many other steps are involved to make fresh food available for consumers?

Your Task: Choose a grocery item from the graphic, then write a story from that item’s perspective detailing its journey from arrival at FreshDirect to delivery to the customer. Be sure to include figurative language and specific details from the infographic.

This prompt and following essay are the brainchild of ninth grade student Chris D. What began as a general narrative writing prompt about the graphic was transformed by Chris into a first-person account of life as a tomato. Here is what he wrote:

Dear Diary,
I was once a little seed, now I am on my way to a factory where I await packaging.

Dear Diary,
I am beginning to be seasick and my neighbor in the package keeps rolling over. He never stops.

Dear Diary,
A tomato above my head broke, so his juices are constantly flowing onto me. This is very unpleasant. However, we are going to dock soon.

Dear Diary,
Yes, in the factory! This room is the perfect temperature for me. Life is good.

Dear Diary,
This will be my last entry, there is a place called the “salad station” where I will be transferred later today. My whole days are done. I will be little slivers soon enough…

Before you do either task, you might …

• Find a product that FreshDirect delivers and, based on the infographic, list the steps that product takes to reach your doorstep.
• Feel free to invent steps on the journey that are not covered in the graphic.
• Like Chris, think of creative ways to express your chosen product’s journey. You might write your story as a diary entry; a monologue; a dialogue between two or more items; a comic strip; a psychiatrist’s report; an obituary or any other form that captures what you want to say.

Extension Activity

Choose an item that you use in your daily life and research where each piece of it comes from. What is its story? See if you can trace its path from the origin of each piece of it til how it got to you. (For instance, if you choose a carton of orange juice, you must research not just the juice itself, but also the pieces that make up the carton, as well as the transportation route that brought the parts together and got them to you.)

To start your research, you can learn about the company that produced the item, as well as find out where it was produced, who made it, how they made it and how it got to the store where you bought it. Create an infographic of your own explaining “The Story of ______ ” for your class.