I am currently working on my lesson plans for my 5-7 day unit, during which I will be covering William Faulkner's classic, "A Rose for Emily." I am very excited; this is one of my favorite short stories!
To accompany the reading and evaluate my students' understanding, I am also planning a brief persuasive essay. The students will be expected to convince their audience of Emily's guilt or innocence by giving supporting evidence from the text. If I feel that there is time, I may need to cover some basic MLA citations and formatting rules. This is something I am a little worried about since I am unsure of how familiar they are with citing. I feel like this is something that can get extremely confusing, so I'm looking for a very simple overview of MLA that will cover the necessary basics.
In my searching, though, I found a neat little website: http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/storymap/index.html, which allows students to do story mapping online, then print out all of their notes. Depending on the story, or the topic covered that day, students can do up to 4 different story maps. Each one comes with prompts and the whole thing is just more interactive than a worksheet, which is becoming more and more necessary for effective teaching nowadays. I do think that it may be much too elementary for some classes, though.
On a side note, my pre-student teaching is going fairly well. My goal of late seems to be to eliminate the cheating that half of the class partakes in whenever they get handed a worksheet. I've had several discussions with students about the value of doing their own work. It is difficult to tell sometimes if I've actually made an impact when I discuss the ramifications of cheating with them, though. Usually, it is clear once the next worksheet is handed out...
Monday, September 24, 2012
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Blog Post #1
I am currently in the process of attempting to narrow down the topic for my impending three-day lesson plan. As juniors in high school, they are in American English and lack the time to cover any Shakespeare around the items dictated by the English 3 Pacing Guide. Thus, my CT and I have been throwing around a handful of different ideas...The Great Gatsby, a short story unit that would include classics such as "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" and "A Rose for Emily," or a grammar unit that would involve writing a short paper.
As one may have gathered from my previous posting, the students lack strong writing and grammar skills. My worry with that, however, is developing a lesson that is in-depth enough to last three days but not so complicated that it will leave them in the dust. For this class it also needs to be EXTREMELY relatable to their everyday lives in order to keep their focus.
My current idea involves deeper thinking questions such as:
1. What does it mean to be a voice of modern culture?
2. What are the most influential voices in American culture?
3. What makes these voices so influential?
The students would write on each of these questions for 5 minutes or so and then discuss them as a class. These questions would of course need to tie into the literature they should read, which I would love to be very recent pieces instead of something they would consider old and out of date. Suggestions for such pieces would be greatly appreciated!
The lesson would then be completed with a brief writing assignment of some kind. I am uneasy about having them write a paper because, even though it is definitely a skill they need to have developed before college, it is not something they would take to. In other words, many of the papers they would turn in would lack in effort. It is something I will certainly have to give more thought to.
As one may have gathered from my previous posting, the students lack strong writing and grammar skills. My worry with that, however, is developing a lesson that is in-depth enough to last three days but not so complicated that it will leave them in the dust. For this class it also needs to be EXTREMELY relatable to their everyday lives in order to keep their focus.
My current idea involves deeper thinking questions such as:
1. What does it mean to be a voice of modern culture?
2. What are the most influential voices in American culture?
3. What makes these voices so influential?
The students would write on each of these questions for 5 minutes or so and then discuss them as a class. These questions would of course need to tie into the literature they should read, which I would love to be very recent pieces instead of something they would consider old and out of date. Suggestions for such pieces would be greatly appreciated!
The lesson would then be completed with a brief writing assignment of some kind. I am uneasy about having them write a paper because, even though it is definitely a skill they need to have developed before college, it is not something they would take to. In other words, many of the papers they would turn in would lack in effort. It is something I will certainly have to give more thought to.
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