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last.updated 2.28.06

Abstracts: Group 1

Camille

I will be doing a mini lesson for 12th graders. My goal for this lesson is to have my students start thinking about their research paper, which will be a comparison of Hemingway’s life and his literary works. In this lesson, I will ask my students what they know about Hemingway, which they will write in a one to two paragraph journal entry. We will discuss what everyone knows and share ideas through discussion.

I will be teaching my students how to organize their ideas and thinking skills in a pre-writing assignment. With my students, I will help them organize an organizational chart, or cluster. I will write down topics on the board, with the help of my student’s suggestions. I will make sure that everyone stays on task by writing Hemingway in the middle of the board, followed by topics of literary works, facts on the author, and themes of his works. My students will then discuss, in class, these topics in more depth, as we complete the organizational chart.

After finishing our cluster on the board, I will hand out the cluster that I have previously completed in order for them to keep as a guideline. This cluster will give them the basics and act as a guide for their eventual research paper.

Emily

This lesson is part of an extended unit on visual art as literary inspiration designed for 10th grade students. With the adjustment of requirements and prompts, the unit could be adapted to multiple levels. For this portion of the unit, students are asked to write responses to Vincent Van Gogh’s painting "The Starry Night," first in the form of a freewriting activity, then through the use of heuristic questions designed to encourage further thoughts on the painting.

The next step in the unit would be for students to use the ideas generated in class to expand their writing, eventually creating an original poem. Students would also be asked to read other pieces of writing inspired by famous writers and their peers.

Lesson Outline:

1.) Students open document
2.) Students click link for image and view
3.) Freewrite on painting
4.) Teacher reads prompts allowing time for student response
5.) Assign homework:

a. Read Anne Sexton poem and Don McLean lyrics
b. Expand writing done in class into a two-page response.

The goals of this assignment include:

• To inspire student writing and creativity through various mediums
• To provide students with a foundation for expanding their initial reactions into more developed writing
• To develop the foundations for:

  1.) a poem inspired by Van Gogh’s Starry Night
  2.) an original poem by students inspired by a painting of their choice

• To provide opportunities for students to engage in the collaborative history of art and the written word
• To encourage technological literacy and the use of technology in writing

Patrick

"The Stanza: A Poem Room," is the title of my lesson.  It can be taught at any grade level, but for our class intentions, I will be focusing on the 9^th grade.  The entire lesson is an introduction into the purpose and use of stanzas in poetry.  The final writing activity of this lesson, which I will be presenting in class, is the independent study in which the student applies the class discussion to their own writing.

It is important to begin any lesson by introducing students to the most foundational, important, and sometimes simplest aspects of any subject; for poetry, the stanza is one such foundational subject.  The objective of this lesson is to equip students with a technical vocabulary and cognitive ability to organize their thoughts and ideas in the poetry genre.  For the 15 minute presentation, our class will read two poems and discuss the organization, communication, and movement of ideas within these poems (based upon the definition of "stanza").  I will then provide an example of a bio-poem, and the class will conclude by using a template to write their own bio-poem, applying the concepts covered during the class discussion.            

This lesson is foundational for helping students understand how to intelligibly craft their ideas into tiny parcels of insight and begin to perceive how these parcels contribute to the whole idea (or poetic package) of a poem.  The ideas explored in this lesson will thus transfer into all other poetic and prose writing.