Creative Teacherette

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 ...

Here comes one more method for doing literature. It is great because it really makes the students examine the text to a tiniest detail. And if you use this as a form of a group work, you won’t regret it since everyone will be doing something according to their roles. No more hanging onto the strongest fellow students, even the weakest ones will be able to contribute. So how do you start? First you print out the roles, which you will assign to your students. Make sure that all the roles you decide to use can be played out with the text you have chosen. Then you give your students the text, tell them to work individually or in pairs and explain that each of them is given a role and has to work on literary text according to the role and the assignment he or she was given. After 10 min they have to present what their role was and what they found out. Here are just some short descriptions of roles, but you can download the whole sheet with detailed description of role...

One of the methods I really like for working on a literary text is called dicing . It is a method that allows an analysis of certain topics from different aspects. All you have to do is make a dice with these six words written on it: DESCRIBE, COMPARE, CONNECT, ANALYZE, USE, FOR / AGAINST. By throwing the dice the students are required to write down about a certain topic - they either have to compare something, analyze it or use it, etc. After that students discuss the topic. I used this method as a part of the analysis of the story Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. The lesson is pretty long (90min), but if you want, I can explain what I did in some of the next posts and maybe even give you the lesson plan . What do you think? I also used two more interesting methods, which I will explain in a few posts.  The dice for Jonathan Livingston had the following things written on it: DESCRIBE how Jonathan pursued his dreams! COMPARE Jonathan with the rest o...