Journey Through History

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!).

We do not learn to drive by reading about it alone, and “citizenship, like driving, is not a spectator sport” (The American Promise, 1998).  I follow this model when teaching Civics, giving students the opportunity to practice participation in government, in addition to learning about it in class.

Therefore, all of my students must write a letter to an elected official or a letter to the editor about an issue of their choice (and we mail them!).  They must also choose from a menu of interactive activities and complete one of them.  These include: visiting a government agency, attending a town meeting, completing a government-related job shadow, or conducting a government-related interview.

Feel free to adapt these documents for your purposes.  I’m sure I did at some point, and I don’t even remember from where I got the original ideas and materials, so thank you to anyone from whom I have borrowed.