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last.updated 10.28.07

Presentation 2–Abstracts

Dani-Nicole

I am preparing to teach a mini lesson on vivid verbs to a 7th grade classroom. My unit plan will focus on the personal narrative as it prepares students to write their own narrative about a memory. The mini lesson on vivid verbs fits in with the overall unit because students should learn to use more “vivid” verbs in their writing as opposed to “tired” verbs in order to help their readers draw a better image in their minds as they delve into the memory. At this point, students will be familiar with verbs, so I will just be enhancing their knowledge. The ultimate goal of my mini lesson is to have my students see the usefulness and importance of using vivid verbs in their writing. I also want them to see that finding a more vivid verb isn’t as difficult as they think.

Haley

My pedagogical presentation will focus on using figurative language in creative writing. This particular lesson is intended for a 9th grade audience although the idea could be altered for a range of grade levels. My goal for this assignment is to make sure that the students understand imagery, metaphor and simile and can apply that understanding into a creative assignment. The students will be broken into small groups with an assigned recorder and reader. Students will practice inventing their own similes with the help of Langston Hughes’ poem, "A Raisin in the Sun," as a framework. After reading Hughes’ poem as a class, each group will create their own version using a provided worksheet where all of the figurative language in the poem is left as blanks. This assignment is within the context of a three-week unit plan on creative writing specifically focusing on poetry, short stories and prose. Each week will explore one of the three genres by looking at examples in literature, learning about the main literary terms within each genre and then displaying the learned material in the students’ own writing. At the end of the three-week period the students will have a creative writing portfolio with one poem, one short story and one prose work. My audience in English 455 can assume that we just finished learning about the main components of a poem and we specifically covered figurative language in the class period before this lesson.

Matt

This Wednesday for my presentation we will be developing a cluster web based on an excerpt from the novel Huckleberry Finn. The excerpt itself depicts a situation Huck finds himself in where he has to come to a moral decision that went against commonly believed ideas about race and racial relations. The class will meditate and brainstorm together in an attempt to decide, based on the excerpt, if Huck (and the author, Twain – despite their “vocabulary”) was in fact, actually and abolitionist.

From the excerpt we will be developing a cluster map of ideas that relate to the novel and support our ideas about Huck. We will be basing the cluster map on both the excerpt that I provide you with in the hand-out, and also a general question as to determine the true nature of Huck and the purpose of the novel. The extended part of this activity that we will not get to during the brief presentation is the development of a paragraph based on the completed cluster map. The purpose of the cluster map is serving as a “warm-up” activity to generate classroom discussion and ideas that can be written into a well developed and structured paragraph.

Michelle

My pedagogical presentation will cover the use of active and passive voices in grammar. The intended audience will be a class of 10th graders.

The major assignment in my Unit Plan is a persuasive essay in which the students write from the perspective of a local political candidate. Therefore, I want to ensure that students are aware of how important it is to use an active voice in their writing because they are trying to reach a large audience and induce action, hopefully in the form of a vote. It is not always easy to spot passive voice, but once we restructure passive sentences, we see how much stronger they become. In turn, a strong sentence makes a good impression on one’s intended audience by demonstrating confidence and straightforwardness.

After a brief explanation of passive and active voice, including certain words that can signal passive voice, I will ask the class to break up into groups of four. They will spend a short time working on an activity sheet asking them to “rewrite” sample passive voice sentences into active voice sentences. We will then talk about our answers. I will wrap up by explaining some situations in which passive voice is considered appropriate, such as scientific writing.