Fahrenheit 451: Using Lit Circles

451 degrees Fahrenheit...the temperate at which paper catches fire.

On Monday, we're going to start one of my favorite novels to teach - Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

I am teaching this book in the context of a bigger theme I've woven throughout this whole semester--censoring and banning books. I have mentioned on here before that my students read a banned book of their choosing third quarter. I actually have an activity I did with that that I will be posting on Monday. I'm excited to share!

In May, they will be writing argumentative essays on this topic as well. So we will be using Bradbury's novel to discuss censorship of reading material, not only today, but in the context of the 50s, which is when he wrote this book. Some of the predictions he made in that novel are creepily accurate today ("Sea shells" in everyone's ear all the time? What does that sound like ? Ear buds constantly plugged into our kids' ears?)

We haven't started it yet, but I plan to use lit. circles and discussion groups throughout our study of this book. Often, lit circles are used when different students are reading different books. However, I think it can work with one novel as well.

I split the kid into groups of four. They get to choose who has which role for each discussion; they can keep the same role the whole time or switch it up--they get to decide.

The roles are as follows (I have given an abridged description below):

1. Discussion leader: Comes up with seven critical thinking questions about that day's reading to ask the group. They cannot be simply comprehension questions. This person is in charge of keeping order in the group and taking questions to me.

2. Vocabulary wizard: Find ten unknown words in the reading to define, name the part of speech, list synonyms/antonyms and describe in context of the book. (Great role for the lower-level students in each group).

3. Quote selector: Find 5 meaningful or significant quotes in the reading, write them out, and write out the significance of each.

4. Summarizer: Write an original two-paragraph summary of main events and characters from that section.

On days when reading assignments are due, students will get in groups to discuss their writing assignments from above. This should take about half an hour. They have a form to fill out for this with an added section for group notes that they should take during discussion.

I wanted to make sure they were understanding the book and really getting as deep as I wanted them to. I worried that leaving ALL the discussion up to them might leave some necessary gaps. So for the last part of class, I will put 5 discussion questions on the board that I came up with, and they will first discuss in their groups, and then move to a full-class discussion. This way I can make sure we're all on the same page about what's going on. But hopefully the discussion groups will get more kids engaged in the discussion.

I'll report back on how this goes after we've tried it! What other tactics do you use for discussing a class-wide novel?

Working in supplemental informational text

Wow that's a pretty wordy title, but I wanted to be as specific as possible.

Today I thought I'd give an example of how I bring in some supplemental informational text, which is aligned with CCSS.

A lot of people read the CC standards and gasp "No more fiction! Only non-fiction! The horror!" And while CC does say about 60% of what high school students should be reading is informational text, that means ACROSS THE CURRICULUM. Meaning, 60% of your English class does NOT have to be strictly non-fiction.

Students are reading non-fiction (or informational text) in science, social studies, Spanish, foods, consumer ed.....you get the idea! Most of what they read in other subjects is informational, not fiction. So it's OK to still teach a lot of fiction in English class.

But what CCSS would like us to do is bring in supplemental materials sometimes in addition to our fictional texts. It is actually fairly easy to find a non-fiction text that relates to something you're studying in fiction.

If you're reading Fahrenheit 451, students could read an article about the pros/cons of censoring books.

To go along with To Kill a Mockingbird, they could research the history of the "n" word or read the Jim Crow Laws, or a plethora of other ideas.

These are things you probably are already DOING in your novel units anyway without necessarily thinking of it like this.

I'm going to give you an example of a lesson I recently did that tied fiction and non-fiction together.

We have been doing an American Poets unit in my junior class, and we recently read "Birches" by Robert Frost. (I admit, I choose my favorite poems to teach my students. "Birches" is one of my absolute favorite poems EVER!)

So after we did our lesson analyzing the poem, I had them listen to JFK's speech at Amherst College which honored Robert Frost after his death in 1963:
{Hint: If you only want the part that talks about Frost, start it at 6:28}

 I give them a printed version of the text of the speech and have them annotate as they are listening/following along to show evidence of a close reading.

These are the specific instructions I gave them on their sheet (click to make larger)

After we listened to it, I let them go back through and take more time to add annotations if they couldn't keep up with the recording. After they did this, I brought it up on the Smart Board and had about 5 students mark their annotations in just the first three paragraphs. I talked about how THAT was the extent and amount of annotations I'd expect for the whole article.

Then for homework, they answered these close reading questions, which I put at the end of the speech:

 We started class the next day discussing their annotations, their answers to these questions, and relating with JFK said about art/poets/artists to Robert Frost specifically, as well as discussed his ideas in general. We talked about whether or not they feel our country is the kind of country JFK described in his speech.

All told, we spent about 1.5 class periods on this supplemental speech, but I am also using it next week to teach parallel structure, so it is killing like three birds with one stone :) 

This is just one example of how you can bring in informational text to supplement the fiction you are already doing, the fiction we want to be teaching.

Creating a Transcendentalist Society

Well, only one snow day last week, and hopefully none this week. We are up to 7 so far, and our last school day (to date) is June 4. We normally are out before Memorial Day, so this is late for us :(

It has been hard getting into a routine with my students, and I hate that my lessons seem disjointed because we have not been in school regularly. I kicked off January with my juniors studying Transcendentalism and we studied works from Thoreau and Emerson. We would get two days here, three days there. So I decided in lieu of a big test, I wanted a culminating project that still allowed students to show they understood the main tenets of that field of thought.

I found the idea of having them create a Transcendental society in my searches online. I wish I could point to the original source, but I found this project on multiple sites, so I don't know who originated it. I will link to one source here.

http://www.madriver.k12.oh.us/webquests/2002-09/kclark.pdf

Again, I found this exact project elsewhere, so who knows who originally started it.

I decided to not have my students do task 7, designing a brochure, since I only wanted this to be a two- to three-day project. I let students work with partners or alone, and they had to design a Power Point or Prezi showcasing their society. All their decisions--name, monetary system, legal system, etc.--had to tie in to Transcendental beliefs, and they had to explain why they chose everything based on Transcendentalism.

We started presenting these Friday, and I am really pleased with the outcome so far. Instead of just memorizing facts about this movement, it required them to understand it well enough to apply it to a society of their own. I would definitely do this project again.

Today's Technology Tidbit: Horrible Histories on YouTube

I haven't done a technology tidbit in awhile, so I thought I'd share something I showed to my juniors in American Lit. this week.

We are about to read an excerpt from Of Plymouth Plantation, and to supplement it, I found a couple more modern articles that discuss the REAL first Thanksgiving, not the stuff many little kids are fed about top hats, buckles, turkey, and a friendly meal. The real first Thanksgiving involved half the Pilgrims not even surviving the trip over to the New World, no top hats, and most likely, not even any turkey. They probably ate seafood like mussels, as well as wildfowl like duck.

The two articles I found were this one from history.com that is a more serious, factual account of it. And this one from Parade magazine, which is a humorous account of one man who decided to host Thanksgiving with his family like the real first Thanksgiving. The students will write an analysis comparing and contrasting the two articles looking at things like author's tone, content, etc.

But anyways, to kick off this unit, I had the students brainstorm what they think of when they think of the first Thanksgiving and I wrote a list on the board. As I expected, most said turkey, pumpkin, Pilgrims, top hats, cornucopias, etc. So then I showed them this humorous (but factual) rap video on YouTube that gave them some inkling of what really happened, and afterwards we talked about how that was different from our list on the board.

Horrible Histories actually has a ton of YouTube videos that range from William Shakespeare to Rosa Parks. I have only checked out the Shakespeare one briefly, and it was funny as well.

The kids found it silly and goofy, which I expected, but they also picked out a lot of the facts that they hadn't known before about the first Thanksgiving. I thought this was an excellent way to get into our Pilgrim/First Thanksgiving literature unit.

And, since the real first Thanksgiving most likely happened in Sept. or Oct. and not November, this is the perfect time of year for it, too.