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
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:
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)
Sample of Unit Calendar
Sample of Materials List
Sample of Lesson Plan
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
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)
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!
Ernest Hemingway
Shirley Jackson
Ray Bradbury
Flannery O'Connor
Raymond Carver
Langston Hughes
John Cheever
Sandra Cisneros
Slides instructing students to read their first of three short stories of their assigned author with review of effective reading strategies.
Graphic Organizer and Checklist for students to complete research project
Students' self-assessment rubric for Short Story Project
Sample Lesson Plan from Short Story Unit (modeling student outlines with prior knowledge)
Slides modeling how to set up and use NoodleTools note cards. (Highly recommended!)
Slides displaying learning goal for CQC paragraph with modeled exemplar.
Student handouts to improve writing by focusing on diction and using academic language.
Student preparation worksheet for The Great Gatsby Socratic Seminar