Jonathan Livingston Seagull
To apologize for being inactive for the last 4 days, today I decided to give you the whole lesson plan on one of my favorite books of all time - Jonathan Livingston Seagull. This is a lesson plan for 90 minutes, which is a double class in Croatia. It deals with literature and uses different methods and activities to work this story by Richard Bach.
"Dicing" was the first method I presented, and you can read all about it here.
I also used "Literary Circles", which was presented here.
Then there is a method called "Save the Last Word for Me", which is very useful for shy and silent students. While reading a
paragraph, students are asked to find one or more quotations they consider
quite interesting and comment worthy, each student writes their own quotation on a piece of paper (they should
not forget the page number) and send it to the others to comment. On the other side of the paper the
other students (in a row) write their comments about the quotation. During the next class the students
bring their own quotation with the comments of the others and the teacher asks
someone to read theirs out loud. After
certain quotation has been read, the teacher asks for comments and reactions
from other students. To end a
discussion about the quote the teacher asks the student who chose it to read
his/her comment aloud (there is no discussion afterwards). Teacher can now call out another student to read their quote and
start a new discussion.
The concept of the whole lesson is "Reading with Anticipation", which is another great method for literature classes. You basically cut out the pieces of a story and your students read it piece by piece, anticipating what could happen next. This way it all gets more interesting.
You can download all the materials for this class if you click on the following links or in my older posts from the introduction:
What do you think about this lesson? Would you use it or some parts of it in your classes?
Hey thanks a lot! I teach ESL in Colombia and trying to stress reading importance this year so this lesson might be useful!
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