I stumbled upon a quirky little video of Pär Lagerkvist’s “The Princess and All the Kingdom,” a short fable that is in our tenth-grade literature book. I love that they’re all wearing jeans and t-shirts! The homemade shield is cool, as are the ninja guy’s blue eyes. And pretty good slo-mo editing on the splattering blood and the beheading!
I made rubrics for the Character Trading Card activity my students completed during this past week or so and want to share.
Click here to download the Word file.
There are eight small rubrics on each sheet to save paper and copy time.
I left the “Points Possible” column blank for now, but I’ll probably give five points per quality, for a total of 25 points.
The five criteria include:
I like to give out rubrics before students complete an activity, and since I didn’t have to foresight (OR TIME!!) to do so, I’ll probably give back the cards for a day to allow time for students to make sure their cards are in order. It seems only fair to me. :/
I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions!
Literary Character Trading Cards
This is a great activity to get students involved with the characters they are reading about. It could work with any round character, whether it be one from a novel or short story.
The online tool takes you through the process step by step, asking questions about the character’s description, insights, development, and statements and actions, and finally about the reader’s impressions of the character.
It’s really easy to use; you can skip questions and come back to them, either with the “last question” and “next question” buttons or with the section links. All of your answers are viewable immediately on the card at right.
The hardest part for me was paring down my answers to fit within the word count! Especially for one of my all-time FAVORITE characters, Atticus Finch, it took me some time to say everything I wanted to say in the space allowed. =)
Once you’re done, print it out. The sheet turns into a playing card after you cut it out and fold it over, and there is a place for a (pasted-on?) picture, also.
The ReadWriteThink site is a humongous collection of English/language arts activities and lesson plans. The organization is a collaboration between the International Reading Association (IRA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the Verizon Foundation. I’m adding this site to my resource links today!
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has to be one of my all-time favorite novels. Every time I read it (and that’s at least 15 times now since high school!), I find myself immersed in 1920s-era New York (one of my favorite cities even today), and I always find something I haven’t noticed before.
I enjoy the way Fitzgerald capitalizes on his characters’ weaknesses without condemning them (well, at least most of them). Gatsby has a good heart, but he’s a criminal. Daisy is sweet and witty, but she’s weak. Narrator Nick says, at the end of chapter 3, that he is one of the few honest person he has known, but it seems to me that he has to be lying to himself to he believe it. Or at least he has a pretty shallow view of honesty.
The smallest details captivate me: Meyer Wolfsheim’s cufflinks made of human molars, the whistles of the National Biscuit Company factory (which, of course, later became known as NBC), Nick’s staring at Gatsby’s mansion from his lawn “like Kant at his church steeple” while Gatsby and Daisy do their reacquainting.
I generally reserve Gatsby for my advanced students, and it’s on the eleventh-grade reading list at our school. As with many other novels, my students usually hate the story at first, but once they get to the party scenes, they’re hooked. By the end, they’re pretty much as in love with Daisy as most anyone else who’s read the book and don’t want it to end.
I can’t help it; I love William Shakespeare. =) And, believe it or not, most of my students do, too!
Julius Caesar is on the curriculum in my district for tenth-graders, and although analysis of the play with all its five acts is a time-consuming process, it’s an enjoyable one, as well. They really love analyzing the betrayal and revenge, and they always have some, shall we say, lively discussions on the issue of suicide. And there’s always a great debate as to whether Caesar or Brutus is the protagonist of the play.
In the last few years, I’ve had my students reading along with a CD of the play rather than taking parts and reading it aloud as I used to do. This takes less time, of course, and I feel that it’s beneficial for my students because the actors’ readings help to get across the meaning of the play, so that the sixteenth-century language doesn’t get in the way of their understanding quite as much. I pause the CD after most scenes, and we discuss the plot, characters, conflict, etc., using the study questions I give them as a guide.
The anticipation guide I use focuses on students’ prior knowledge of the issues involved in the play. Each act’s study questions are listed according to scene, and each act’s quiz is composed of fill-in-the-blank statements drawn from the study questions. In the memorization activity, students memorize lines from Antony’s funeral speech, and in the character-description / quote-practice activity, students have to find quotes from the play that characterize a number of characters. I have the final test in either an InDesign file, and as soon as I am able, I will convert it into a Word file or a Word file that I will e-mail you if you contact me.
Available Teaching Materials
“The Censors” is a (very) short story by Luisa Valenzuela, who was born November 26, 1938, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The full text, translated from Spanish, is available online.
The story centers on a young man named Juan, who takes a job with the government censorship office in order to intercept a letter he’d mailed to his friend, Mariana. Mariana had fled the country for Paris, and Juan knows that his letter may jeopardize her safety and his own. The plot turns ironic when Juan becomes so obsessed with his job that he ends up censoring his own letter, thereby incriminating himself and causing his own destruction.
My resources for study of “The Censors” cover the Oral Language strand of the Virginia Standards of Learning for English 10, having students work collaboratively with specific roles and assignments. Following discussion, each group makes a presentation of its findings to the class, while other students evaluate the presentations.
After we have read and discussed the story, I separate the class into groups, and each analyzes the story from a different angle: characters, conflict, humor, plot, and theme. The humor activity is most definitely the most difficult, because the humor in the story not as much “funny” as it is darkly satirical. In some cases, it would be best to divide the class into four groups and reserve the humor activity for a whole class discussion.
Available Teaching Materials
A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, was the first novel I ever taught — way back in student teaching, and I’ve loved it ever since.
On one hand, its depiction of teenaged boys in a private boarding school just before World War II (based on Knowles’ own experience at the elite Phillips Exeter Academy) is so far-removed from most of my students’ lives that it may as well be science fiction. On a deeper level, however, these boys are not so different from my students today.
Knowles does a beautiful job of presenting a believable unreliable narrator, a boy locked so tightly within his own insecurities and guilt that he can’t give the key to the one person who desperately tries to get in. I’ve heard it said that you can’t love anyone until you love yourself. Gene can’t love anyone.
Lord of the Flies, by Englishman William Golding, is an interesting narrative of a group of boys who are stranded on a desert island when their plane crashes.
My students tend to take a while to warm up to this story — which seems to be the case with most novels in the hands of my students. . .
However, Golding’s vivid characterization of the boys and the premise of a world without adults usually win them over in the end.
The Color of Water, by writer/musician James McBride, is an excellent autobiographical account of the author’s struggle to define himself. The book is subtitled “A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother,” and that places it in context pretty well.
Every other chapter is from his mother’s point of view; she was raised an Orthodox Jew in Suffolk, Virginia (not too far from my neck of the woods!), and ended up marrying a black man and moving to New York City. Her Jewish family basically declares her dead to them, and she and her husband start a Christian church. If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s entrancing. Even some students who hate reading can’t put this one down!
Animal Farm was written by George Orwell, the pen name of Englishman Eric Arthur Blair. The novel, which can be found in full online, was published in 1945 and was written as a satirical allegory of early Soviet Russia.
Many students detest the book when they begin, I’ve found, but by the time they’ve read the first few chapters, they’re usually hooked and give the novel great reviews in the end.
In student teaching, I worked with Ray Robinson at GWHS, where I currently teach. He was the head of the department until he retired two years ago. He had his basic English 12 class reading Animal Farm and tied it in with Dr. Zhivago, which was already one of my favorite movies!
It’s an interesting set of companion pieces, since the film’s backdrop is Russia during World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution that directly followed and washed the country in Communism.
I’d like to get together some materials on the history behind the novel and a viewing guide for the film. I know there are also a number of excellent websites of which I’d like to gather a list. (More to come!)
