"A Garden in Lawndale" is a one page, non-fiction, reading passage about an eighth grade class who planted a garden in a vacant lot by their school and maintained it to improve their neighborhood. It is followed by constructed-response questions which require students to provide evidence from the story; it includes underlining the most important sentence in each paragraph, determining the main idea and writing a summary including text support. This passage aligns with Common Core Anchor Reading Standards 1, and 2 requiring close reading, textual evidence, central ideas/themes, and summarizing key ideas.