Here's a decent search engine for English and Literature Teachers. Resources are aplenty and all you have to do is click on the categories at the side. Besides lesson plans and literature content, this site offers practical methodology help. We would need some directions to teach students how to handle their content.
These are some hilarious Jokes, Puns and Parodies to tell your students. They help to break down icy walls of disdain and diffuse apathy towards Literature. e.g. Romeo and Juliet Text Messages. They can be fillers in between or entrees at the start of a potentially tedious lesson.
1) Teach the art of Annotating. Give students Step by Step Directions and Rationales why they should brighten up their book with colorful scribbles to aid learning. Something so natural to us literature majors may be foreign for our students. They need to be held through a nice and simple structure on how to annotate- not write down everything the teacher says or simply highlight the book with 7 different colors.
2) Some of us may be averse to common ICT tools and rigid classroom strategies. Here's a Library of Strategies (most work well for literature) to whet our appetite and vary our teaching approaches. With Story Maps, they provide a simple document to scaffold lower secondary students' understanding of plot structure (i.e. we don't have to create one ourselves). There's also Power Notes to help us help students to organise their study notes. Anticipation Guides reminded the one main issue that perhaps I forget sometimes: engaging mind and heart- How to get students be personally involved at the onset of a new material so as to sustain the interest through out... So browse and pick when one fine day you find you're out of ideas. The other strategies in the library do make preparing lessons sound more exciting!
3) If ever we want to create an MCQ from scratch for students, here's a site that suggests how to Craft Questions and Distracters. The site looks a little dodgy but the stuffs are ok. They test students on the whole range of competencies like functions of style, rhetorical devices, purpose, organization etc.
hi emily,
ReplyDeletethanks for sharing! i like the bit about teaching the art of annotation :) agree with you that sometimes it just feels natural for us as lit majors to annotate our books, but think we have to coax this out from our students a bit more and the website you shared gave some practical pointers on what to mark out and why marking out helps learning.
thanks again for sharing! :)
Wow, Emily! I love how animated and cute this site is! :) especially the text msgs between romeo and juliet. it just occurred to me, that just for fun, we can get the kids to transpose the story of various shakespeare texts (like macbeth) into MSN conversations, or facebook pages or twitter account entries too. it's like a modern twist to test their understanding of the textual content.
ReplyDeletelike an MSN conversation can be utilised to demonstrate relationship for example, if we were to get LMB and MB to talk to each other. only requirement could be to use grammatically correct sentences. :)
Thanks for sharing!