Units, Lessons, and Slides

Below are highlights from the various units and lessons that I have designed. Feel free to peruse and click on links to view specific unit plans, detailed lesson plans, worksheets and resources!

Back to Home Page Slaughterhouse-FIve 1984 The Metamorphosis One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

The Stranger Short Story Research The Great Gatsby The Brief & Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: "Humor, Tone, and Politics"

Essential Questions:

1. What is tone and how is it politically powerful?

2. Should tragedies be the subject of comedy or is this inherently disrespectful and taboo?

3. Is pain funny? Is humor painful?

Click to download PDF of Complete Unit which includes:

Curricular Philosophy
Detailed Unit Calendars
Assessment Plan
ELL/Differentiation Plan
Rubrics
Variety of worksheets and assessments

Sample of Unit Calendar

Academic Discussion Preparation Worksheet

Self-assessment Rubric for students and teacher

Tone Graphic Organizer

Sample from Differentiation Plan

Character Instagram Worksheets

Worksheet for students to watch and assess modelled academic discussion with rubric.

Sample Slides from Opening of the Unit. (click here to view)

Unit Plan for George Orwell's 1984 and the "Bleeding Edge"

Essenital Questions:

How do the dystopian themes in 1984 interact with other texts and our past, present, and future political environment?
How do advancements in technology (and our interactions with those technologies) influence politics, pop-culture, and collective consciousness?
How can contemporary writers, artists, and academics (YOU!) use technology responsibly, politically, and effectively?

PDF of complete Unit

Sample Lesson Plans

Sample of Unit Calendar

Sample of Materials List

Sample of Lesson Plan

Kafka's The Metamorphosis & Literary "Distortion"

Essential Questions:

Why do authors distort reality in their work?
Is distorted fiction any more bizarre than our reality?

Essay Instructions with academic language supports

Vocabulary List with images, definitions, and analysis of translation and connotation.

Kafka's Biographical Connections to Text of The Metamorphosis

Timed Write Preparation handout

Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Essential Questions:

What does it mean to be "insane"? Who decides and why might they label someone "insane"?
Under what conditions should authority and order be preferred over freedom and chaos?
Is R.P. McMurphy a hero or a failure?
What does it mean to be truly free?

Slides for students to compare film and text versions of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with scaffolded prior knowledge, graphic organizers, group work, independent work, and academic language sentence templates.

Discussion instructions and preparation for close reading

Slide for modeling using graphic organizers to document character development and connections to significant plot points.

Slides for modeling how to identify author's tone with specific diction.

Sample Lesson Plan with "chunked reading" and use of audiobooks for differentiating instruction (above) and modeling character development with academic language sentence templates (right)

Camus' The Stranger and Existentialism

Essential Questions:

Is it more important to follow society's rules or your own beliefs?
Is their inherent meaning in life?
How can we avoid living in "bad faith"?

Slides connecting Sartre's concept of "bad faith" to students' lives, showing pneumonic device to guide students in finding existential elements in the text for their final essay. (Links to Lesson Plan and to Student Worksheet)

Graphic organizer for important textual details during the trial of Meursault

Slides for modeling character mapping with prior knowledge. The students read The Catcher in the Rye the previous year (right slide). Character maps use descriptions and quotes from text to infer deeper character relationships.

Below is the video of "Trial of Meursault" where students all prepare and play characters from The Stranger or jobs of a courthouse including prosecution, defense, reporters, media, and jury.

Check out the student beat writer's twitter account, @strangertrial, for an account of the trial!