Modified Socratic Seminar
This is actually a lesson I did during my methods experience. It's for a 7th grade honors class who was studying Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the same time they were reading Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls. After I finished my methods experience with this class, the students were going to be writing an argumentative paper. I utilized this opportunity to create a debate for the students to do that would prepare them for that paper. Both A Monster Calls and A Midsummer Night's Dream can be considered a comedy or a tragedy. After discussing the difference the day before, I facilitated this lesson plan the next day where students broke up into their groups and debated whether A Midsummer Night's Dream was a comedy or not. I had put them in groups and told students in Group 1 to argue for tragedy and Group 2 to argue for comedy. Each group had two speakers and one runner. The runner received notes from the non-verbal group members, and they passed them to the speakers to use at their discretion. I gave them specific instructions on how I expected the debate to run. I also guided the debate for a few minutes to model what I had instructed of them. On the lesson plan, you will also find a sample of the rubric I created that I used to grade the students with. After a few minutes, they caught on very quickly and ran with it. It was a great lesson that the students got a lot out of.
The Diary of Anne Frank Review Game
This is a lesson plan for a review game that I created from a SMART Notebook template called Kooshball. I created this game for my 8th grade classes that I am currently teaching. This game starts of on a screen of different colored buttons. I had students come up one at a time and handed them a soft ball. The students stood about 5-7 feet away from the SMART Board and threw the ball at the board. Whichever button their ball hit is the game/question they had to complete. Each button had a different game/question attached to it so no button was the same. The students loved being able to move around and really respond to what they had learned.
WWII Mini-Project
After my 8th graders finished their Anne Frank unit, I created a mini-project for them to complete in class over a span of two days. On the first day, I gave the students instructions. Since our next unit was poetry, I gave them three poetry options: Five W Poem, Acrostic Poem, and Haiku. They had to choose a vocabulary word with a connection to WWII or Anne Frank and base their poem on that word. I explained what each poem was and what I expected for each option, and the students chose based from that information. They had to create a rough draft for me to sign off on before they started their final product. The final product was to involve their poem and an illustrations of the wording of their poem. I had great results from this activity.
