Journey Through History

After we finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird, my students did character sketches, which served a dual purpose. First, they delved more deeply into the character that they were assigned, but they also collectively reviewed key points in the novel. I began by demonstrating presentation skills for the students by modeling the PowerPoint I created on the character of Braxton Bragg Underwood. Then, I gave students time to work in pairs to complete their own PowerPoint and present them to the class.

This assignment worked well for To Kill a Mockingbird, but could certainly be adapted to any piece of literature.

Ms. Green, one of my Woodstock Academy colleagues, showed me how to use vocabulary cartoons to make vocabulary acquisition fun and memorable for students. My students and I had a blast with these! While we read To Kill a Mockingbird, each student was assigned a word and each day, we did 1-3 words before they came up in that day’s reading. I gave students a chart on which they could keep track of each word and its definition.

I was terrified that I would turn students off of Shakespeare, but was gratified when Romeo and Juliet turned out to be their favorite text of the year! I attribute this success to the groundwork I laid in helping students understand the Bard’s language. To begin, I had students write Elizabethan-style skits. Then I asked them to guess whether Shakespeare wrote in Old, Middle, or Modern English. Of course, they guessed Old English, so I did a lesson on the changing English language. By the end of that, they were just relieved that we weren’t reading Old or Middle English! Finally, before starting the play, we looked at Shakespeare’s sonnets (see lesson, handout, and accompanying PowerPoint slides). I also did this lesson because I had them write a paper on a sonnet while we were reading Romeo and Juliet in class. By the way, this lesson was mostly taken from http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/educators/language/lessonplan.html .

Before starting the play, I laid out Romeo & Juliet’s family trees. Then, once we got into Shakespeare a bit, I got students to appreciate Shakespeare’s use of puns, and had students play “Dear Abby.” (The family tree and the Abby assignment must be credited to my former colleague Cassie Green, who was a HUGE help in my first foray into teaching English!).