Free Literature Lesson Plans for Adaptation!

So I was a little concerned that (quality) literature materials might be hard to find, but that worry was unwarranted. I realised (to my own embarrassment) that the internet is much larger than I think it to be, and even though I had to trawl through various sites to find some teacher appropriate resources, I found one that was pretty decent. It can be found at www.discoveryeducation.com. It’s great because there are lots of free teacher specific resources (read: lesson plans!) that have a specified age group (grades 9-12) and outlines. Some of the books and topics they cover are actually directly relevant and all we need to do is some adaptation for our own classroom contexts.

I’ve chosen a lesson plan on “The Great Gatsby” to share. You can access it via this link:

http://www.discoveryeducation.com/teachers/free-lesson-plans/the-great-gatsby.cfm

The gist of this lesson plan is simply to get the class into groups and getting different group members to do dramatic reading of specifically highlighted passages in the text. These passages are the ones that would lend themselves easily to a dramatic reading because of the amount of dialogue and number of things happening in a scene. In their groups, they are supposed come up with a script: deciding who gets to say what and how they are going to say it. They will definitely need time to work on the script as well as time for rehearsal, so this lesson will minimally be a unit of work at least 4 periods long, because it will be unrealistic to expect this to be completed in say 2 periods. This lesson is interesting because it requires students to know the text well, with special attention paid to the characters. By getting them to dramatise and do a role play of sorts, will effectively help them gain insights into the text itself and not merely studying it as a matter of academic interest e.g. to answer essay questions. I feel that this is one way to make literature literally come alive in the classroom.

Perhaps to make it more fun, it can be framed like a drama contest where a student representative from each group can form a panel of judges. Students' scoring will not be the final score but the discretion and veto power will be left in the hands of the teacher. The group that does the best dramatization wins, and special awards can go out to students who are particularly spectacular at portraying the realism of their characters.

With regard to assessment, I was thinking of a few ideas:

1) For official assessment purposes, the teacher can have his/her own evaluation and rubric to score them upon a designated number of marks. To be fair to the more introverted students, maybe the scores can be based on group performance, with some room for variance for individuals.

2) The teacher can also give a reflective writing task post activity where students can talk about how they felt while dramatizing the passages. Students will be instructed to talk specifically about any feelings or insights that have arisen from the activity. This writing task will then be graded.

3) Alternatively, the teacher can give a task post activity that will get them to choose a character in The Great Gatsby and write a journal/diary entry as if they were that character. The writing task will then be graded on how well they portray their character in writing, so the main activity is meant to help them get a sense of how the character is like through dramatization/role play.

In order to combat any lack of enthusiasm on the students’ part, the teacher can declare that all the modes of assessment will be counted for their final grades.