Here's a quick and cheap ($2.50 - its a steal!) lesson activity ready to go complete with online self grading quiz for assessment. Put this lesson in Slideshow mode and just walk your students through how to properly capitalize titles. It's easy and takes about 30-45 minutes of class time.
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/XET-Title-Capitalization-and-Punctuation-7065284
I use it every year for my regular, honors, and AP Lit students.
Currently at Introduction Sale Price - will not be $3 for long!
Wuthering Heights - teachers either love it or hate it. I fall in the former category and have ever since my senior year in high school (1989) largely because my teacher loved it so. Will your students like it? Well, that largely depends on your passion for it. If you do love it and teach it, here are five ready to go activities for you!
Anyone who teaches reluctant readers knows that if you cannot hook them immediately, you've lost them.
So, while sitting in church one day when I should have been listening to the sermon, I had an idea for a game to get my students into the book. I made it all by hand with maps, cards, the whole nine yards. As the years went by, I get tired of replacing lost cards or materials that were marked on by various students and started to take it online. It took a few more years to perfect it, but I think I finally have it down pat. It has by far been the most popular page on my class web site by other teachers and it is the most mentioned lesson of mine when other teachers contact me.
I break my students into groups and each group represents 20 island-stranded kids. The students decide how many rescue fires they will have, where they will be sheltered, who goes hunting, who goes fruit gathering, and if they want to go exploring. Each round is a 'week' in the game.
First thing we do is have each group draw and Act of God card. These cards sometimes bring good things to the group, have no effect on the group, or (more likely) bring bad karma to the group. Then we draw cards to see what happens when they go hunting, fruit gathering, and exploring. At this point we tally up the morale. The morale goes up and down depending on many factors like having shelter for everybody, getting food, people dying (there are a lot of people dying), etc.
If the morale goes below 10, then the group leader has to draw a Revolt card to see what happens. Sometimes something good happens, but most likely something bad will. Then it's off to see if you get rescued.
For the teams that are left, they do it all over again for the next week with the remaining people they have left.
Sometime groups have everything perfect and it is more like a Gilligan's Island episode than a Lord of the Flies scenario. Many groups get a good Lord of the Flies type experience, and some have so much bad luck that they make the book seem like a pleasant fairy tale.
Students are encouraged to think outside of the box and try things that are not expected. The teacher is the final say-so for what happens, so when students get creative, roll with it.
Whatever the outcome, the students experience situations that prep them for the action in the book. Whenever I have used this game, I have found that students are more connected to the reading.
I always like it when teachers send me how their students came up with something new. Sometimes I adjust the game to match it. when my students started sabotaging the game to try and make their leader draw a Revolt card, I introduced a new element - Mutiny. With some groups, that is very popular!
The game comes with the choice to either have it all online (in which case they would move objects on a screen), or to have printables for students to physically manipulate.
Teaching ACES step-by-step
Do you have a solid plan for getting your students to answer the constructed response section of state tests or to just be able to form the basic elements of a short answer question? If not, consider below:
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/XET-Teaching-ACES-for-Constructed-Responses-12163122
ACES provides a formula for students to think about when formatting a constructed response or short answer question. It is the basic structure for organized writing and is often used to set students up for larger works that will require thesis statements and paragraphs. It is also often used on state testing. |
| The poem "Ozymandias" is used to break down each component in each lesson. |
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| After going through the example, students get a chance to practice each part ( lesson one is only A, lesson two is A and C, lesson three is A, C, and E, and the final lesson is A, C, E, and S. |
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| Each lesson has a student worksheet to let them practice with a small reading passage. |
This lesson was designed for an AP Lit class, though I think there would be room for it in an honors class also. I'll walk you through the process to recreate what I did and if you are short on time, I'll give you a link to where I put my final lesson on TPT.
One of the things I wanted to do while teaching AP Lit was to teach different literary lenses (or literary criticisms as they called it when I was in college). I thought how hard could this be?
Turns out, not as easy as I wanted it to be. Well, it's not that the information wasn't out there - it was. It just wasn't already set up in the way I wanted it to be. What I wanted was to have my students read "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and then use the different criticisms to break it apart. I vaguely remember a lesson like that in college - it was my first exposure to the different criticisms. Unfortunately, I did not see anything like that.
So I set out on my own to research the various criticisms (It has been decades since I was in college and I typically taught lower level students, so had no need to explain Post Modernism). I had hung on to that college textbook for decades, but had thrown it out in the past couple of years (of course). I began researching, hoping that I could find references to my poem of choice, but found only a little directly related to "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".
So I finally figured I would just do what I would have done in any of those college lit courses thirty years ago and do my own interpretation of the poem using each lens.
I write this poem on the white board with wet erase markers and annotate in class with dry erase so that I can wipe the annotations off while leaving the poem (that blows their minds). It was also a major factor in me deciding to try this all in two days, rather than potentially spacing it out once a week until done. I like the two days crash course, but I see value in the once a week method as well.
I decided to start with Reader Response Theory, which is not that valuable as a lens for an actual FRQ, but essential as a starting point for these students to understand what they bring to a text. Plus I get to draw this amazing picture on my board which makes students wonder why I didn't become an art teacher:
If you are not familiar with the three book theory, in short it goes that Book 1 (or Text 1) is what the author envisioned writing. Due to changing thoughts, edits, etc., what is produced is Book 2, which is often quite different in many ways from what the author had in mind. That is the text we all read, but what is important to Reader Response Theory is that all of use have Book 3 in our heads - how we interpret Book 2 due to past life experiences, memories, connections made to other books, distractions around us while reading, prior knowledge, and a whole host of other factors that make our experience with the text unique to us.
I use this image for all levels of classes - it is great to get them to understand that their experience with the book has merit too. Once we get them all talking about their memories and feelings with this poem, I explain the significance of that third book which will be so important in our discussions, but can only be discussed by them.
At this point I take a break to discuss how all the lenses we are about to learn are specific disciplines, but much like how Ultimate Fighting Championship morphed from specific fighting style vs specific fighting style into Mixed Martial Arts, we too are able to merge them together to get the most out of our analysis.
Now for the meat of the lesson - I researched all of the following criticisms:
I need another picture to break up the text, so here is a page form my notes:
