A site that excites -- http://edsitement.neh.gov/

Hi all :) Found this site: http://edsitement.neh.gov/ which has such a cute title and which I found useful for its very detailed explanations, creative activities and lesson plans. It has activities for teaching both Lang Arts and Lit, and students are given opportunity to create their own work and in the process appreciate what writers do better.

Under the section for Language and Literature, some of the activities that I found particularly interesting include Arabic Poetry: Guzzle a Ghazal! The historical background, definition and form of the ghazal are provided. I also liked the idea of a Group Ghazal, where “students compose a ghazal in a round robin manner, for a total of thirteen shers”. There are also ideas on how to extend the lesson. Some teaching approaches tend to focus on European literary forms e.g. the sonnet, and students (and teachers) are apt to be rather unfamiliar with non-European literary traditions, especially if they originate from an oral tradition. I was quite impressed that this site was able to provide strategies to expose students to a large variety of genres and literary traditions and to provide the nuts and bolts for teachers to teach these with confidence.

Related to this is the lesson on Cinderella Folk Tales: Variations in Plot and Setting, which traces the development of the very familiar Cinderella story through the ages, from Grimm Brothers to versions from India, Ireland and China. Students are guided to create their Cinderella story and encouraged to think about cultural inflections and different points of view in all these different stories. After yesterday’s class, I thought that a discussion about Disney princesses would be appropriate as well! Of course, if we’re teaching a mixed class, the boys might not be that crazy about Cinderella but there are suggestions for adapting other popular narratives such as Jack and the Beanstalk for this lesson. It also contains a link to SurLaLune Fairy Tales which I love for its treasure trove of illustrations – students can be asked to compare the changes in the representation of fairy tale characters in images as well as in text.

Also, for older students, Seeing Sense in Photographs and Poems introduces William Carlos William’s poetry from Alfred Stieglitz’ 1907 photograph “The Steerage” and helps students to see how meaning is being created. I thought this was such a great idea because it is so challenging to teach William’s imagistic poetry by itself and using photography to do so must be one of the instances where intertextuality is genuinely illuminating.

Other exciting ideas like webquests, sound experiments in poetry, studying the speeches of Obama, creative writing exercises, links between Edison’s inventions and Lit, the history of the alphabet abound.

:) Lilin