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last.updated 11.4.07

Presentation 3–Abstracts

Eileen

Erika

Mini-lesson - Audience
My presentation will be geared toward a 10th grade class. I will be giving a mini-lesson on identifying the audience of your writing. I want this lesson to serve as a reinforcement of a previous lesson we would have gone over about identifying your audience. I want you (my students) to dig into is being versatile in your writing style which is to be able to write for different audiences. Using the activity that you will participate in, as a result, you would be able to take a single subject and write about it using your abilities to tailor your message to several audiences.

It is important that you understand what language to use when writing for different people and in my experience 10th grade is where I had the most difficulty switching gears and I know it would have been helpful to have a mini-lesson on how to do so. It is important for students to be able to switch their writing styles and tailor it to the audiences to which they are trying to appeal. This lesson fits into my overall unit in that we would be getting ready to produce a piece of persuasive writing. Since most of you will be appealing to very different and distinct audiences, this mini-lesson fits perfectly within this specific unit.

Background for the class is that we have already chosen our subjects and had a lesson on audience as far as its definition and importance therefore there is prior knowledge of the subject.

Jill

The expectation of the lesson is to review how to distinguish between an author’s audiences through analyzing text. This lesson is towards the end of the school year and simply a review of the concepts since the students are expected to present an understanding of audience awareness in their research papers. After a demonstration is conducted, the class will carry out a discussion; placing on the board the types of audiences and examples of each.

If time is remaining, the class will work in small groups to read a provided text, distinguish the characteristics of the text that demonstrate the intended audience, and then share with the class their results. I hope to work as a facilitator, viewing the groups’ progress and offering suggestions for the groups that need help. If small group participation is not possible that class assignment can also be done in a large group setting.

During this time students will be preparing a research paper that is tailored to include the elements we have discussed in class today, as well as in previous classes. The assignment is intended for a twelfth grade class.

It covers the SOLs:
12.4 The student will read and analyze a variety of informational materials, including electronic resources.

a) Identify formats common to new publications and information resources.
b) Recognize and apply specialized informational vocabulary.
d) Evaluate the quality of informational and technical materials.

12.7 The student will develop expository and informational writings.

b) Consider audience and purpose when planning for writing.

Rebekah

My lesson is geared toward a 10th grade Language Arts class.

My goals for this lesson are to introduce and review conjunctions and transitions that will help strengthen their writing. The lesson will include a lecture with power point and class discussion. After I go over the conjunctions and transitions in the power point lecture, I will use volunteers from the class to provide visual examples of how conjunctions and transitions affect the reader’s understanding of their essay. For instance, some transitions and conjunctions allow the reader to move forward without making them pause, while others require the reader pause and consider the relationship between the two ideas that are being linked.

This lesson is a part of a unit designed to teach the students how to write a compare/contrast essay. The students will be allowed to pick two poems we have previously studied and write a compare/contrast essay about them, focusing on the poetic elements in each poem. The big writing assignment for this unit is the compare/contrast essay; smaller assignments include journal entries and creative writing exercises. This lesson will come in the middle of the unit, after the students have already written their first draft and gone through the peer review process, and before they create their second draft.