Another Unit Plan Idea

Maybe I will instead do something about the coming of age, the journey from childhood to adulthood, in terms of recognizing the world around you and its various beauties and cruelties. Hmmmmmm.

To Kill a Mockingbird. The Kite Runner. A Separate Peace. The Catcher in the Rye. All are such riveting, well-written books. I could include a New Yorker story about Salinger, written soon after he died this year. Hmmmmmmmmm.

If it was a six-week long session, we could likely get through two of these books: The Kite Runner and To Kill a Mockingbird would show hos children grow to see the cruelty of the world - and to accept it - in two very different countries, and in two very different timeframes. One (Afghanistan) is current - one (America) took place in the 1930s.

I could work in the following:

- Read reviews of both books upon their publishing, and have students respond to those reviews and write a review for each.
- Watch the movie for each in the classroom
- Study the language in TKAM, and discuss ways in which language has changed since the 1930s, specifically words and usages that were common then, but are considered unacceptable now
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Unit Plan Launch Party!

OK, so maybe not a launch party, but today I was *terrifically* inspired while doing field experience at Gainesville Middle School. I was overcome with unit plan ideas and took copious notes as thoughts whizzed through my brain!

Until today, I had thought designing a usable unit plan sounded cool; after seeing kids in action, I could see it taking on life.

I have decided to do a 9th grade English unit plan for Black Awareness Month, centering on Huckleberry Finn. I also had the following ideas:

- How word use, and general acceptability, changes over time
- Read about the Underground Railroad, and have students write a short story about what it must have been like to escape using it
- Bring in other authors from that time: Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin), and so on
- Do a character conflict exercise of Huck Finn: right vs. wrong (based on the ideals of the time, and of today)
- Do a "Whats in the Box" of an artifact from that timeframe
- Read something aloud and have kids write a reaction to it in their WNB
- Idioms
- Grammar lesson - how things have changed since the 1860s
- Poetry: read some slavery- or Lincoln-related poetry, and write a poem about it
- Review the words in The Gettysburg Address - talk about the setting, how many people were there, etc.

Don't worry, little bloggy poo

I won't forget about you just because my MGRP is done. I just needed a week off.

OMG, I'm done!

Woo hooo!

I had a lot of fun with this project. I cant wait to try it out on my own students!

Charles Bernstein Quote

“Many readers when they first encounter a difficult poem say to themselves, "Why me?" The first reaction they often have is to think that this is an unusual problem that other readers have not faced. So the first step in dealing with the difficult poem is to recognize that this is a common problem that many other readers confront on a daily basis. You are not alone!”

—Charles Bernstein

(Charles Bernstein, Harper’s Magazine, June 2003, Volume 306, Issue 1837; ISSN: 0017-789X)

Repentends

It's so funny. Originally, when embarking on this project, I had SO many grand plans for the repentend. Poet epitaphs. Poet obituaries. Children's poems (short ones). Nursery rhymes. Song lyrics that I loved.

But now none of those seem to fit. I can't explain it, because I am not even totally sure my paper makes sense, but the ideas I had before just don't seem to match.

And then I stumbled upon advice from poets to aspiring poets. There is loads of good, valuable, interesting stuff out there! So there we go. And off I go to add them in!

I am not sure adding the repetends in at the end is a good way to do this, but then again, this entire MGRP process has felt cobbled together. I have been working like a dog on it, had a blast writing the crots, enjoyed searching for quotes and other information to include, and now I am off to repentend. But none of it has felt fluid. Maybe I am just much more of a rule follower than this paper enforces. =)

NCTE References

As Lee Odell explains in “Assessing Thinking: Glimpsing a Mind at Work,” “[W]e continually find ourselves making value judgments about students’ work . . . . Where we run into trouble is in trying to articulate these value judgments, especially when we try to explain to students why one piece of writing meets a certain standard and another does not.

Odell, Lee. “Assessing Thinking: Glimpsing a Mind at Work.” Evaluating Writing: The Role of Teachers’ Knowledge about Text, Learning, and Culture. Ed. Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell. Urbana: NCTE, 1999. 7–22.

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Many of us wonder where we should begin poetry studies. Begin the year with poems to which students can personally relate—poems about going to school. Furthermore, rather than starting with the scary, technical elements, give students frequent exposure to poetry and personal writing experiences all year long. In considering such approaches, we might all be able to dismantle fears and poetic phobias from the first day of school.

Poetry, Schmoetry! A Potpourri of Resources to Generate Enthusiasm for the Genre
By Colleen A. Ruggiere Editor, Boardman High School, Boardman, Ohio
English Journal Vol. 96, No. 1 September 2006, Page 115

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…a daily dose of poetry would be a potent elixir for students, and that genre would become a force in students’ lives if they were given the opportunity to make sense of it for themselves.

By Tamara L. C. Van Wyhe, Copper River School District, Glennallen, Alaska
English Journal Vol. 96, No. 1 September 2006, Page 15

As a teacher, I discovered poetry to be magic in many ways. It offered brevity, allowing a quick reading and discussion of a complete piece of text as a way to begin a class period. It offered variety, allowing students to discover a vast array of subjects and styles. It offered a myriad of companion pieces to the novels and nonfiction texts we encountered. It offered a powerful tool for teaching word choice, fluency, and the impact of conventions. It offered opportunities to investigate issues of speaker and audience. It offered questions with no answers, invitations to support assertions based on text, and it helped students understand what mood and tone and emotion really mean when it comes to writing. It offered them models to try on and wear around for a while, eventually helping them to tailor their writing styles. It offered students a genre for documenting their lives, one poetic snapshot at a time.

By Tamara L. C. Van Wyhe, Copper River School District, Glennallen, Alaska
English Journal Vol. 96, No. 1 September 2006, Page 15