1. This is a creative writing assignment
and the instructional objective is to create historical fiction in the form of
diaries that will incorporate student
knowledge of the immigration process.
The students have been prepared for
the assignment in the previous classes
lesson on immigration and through a homework assignment in which each student
writes their original diary entry. This assignment will take about seven minutes
per rotation. Students will write
a diary entry on a person involved in the process of immigration,
before the immigration occurs, for homework.
In class, students will pass their entry one student to
the left, read the new entry that they receive, and write the
next entry in the new person's diary. This can be repeated as many times as desired
and in the end you will have 20+
historical fiction diaries written by the
students from the perspective of various people involved in immigrating to the
new world. Revision isn't part of the initial plan, but later
students could be required to revise the diary that
they started (so they would revise their
writing as well as others) and turn in a final copy for classroom display.
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2.
Subject/Assignment: Eulogy for the Iraqi War dead
I think it's important to know WHY we write. No student
will write anything of power or significance if (s)he
doesn't think her/his views and insights are worthwhile. For this reason, I
tell my students, when I'm substitute teaching, that they have immense power
and all they need do is discover or "take the cover off" their
greatness. We touched on this while discussing the "Write from the
Heart" book.
To begin, all students must know that when they rub their
magic lamp, their genie or 'genius' will appear and that their true self is
"genuine"; traits are passed by way of their genes; to make something
happen is to engender it; the first book of the Bible is Genesis; to be smart
is to be intelliGENT; and all students should learn
that to be generous and gentle is to be virtuous.
I emphasize magi, magic and imagination, relate these to
majority, majesty, maximum, magnet, magnify and magnificent. We discussed the
French word for heart in class ('cour') and how it is
the root of "courage," "encourage" and
"courteous." Now, I would like to relate this anecdote from American
history: when an aide complained to Andrew Jackson, saying "Mr. President,
we don't have a majority," Jackson replied: "one man with courage is
a majority."
One man with courage is a majority.
So, we link heart and imagination, courtesy and
magnificence, courage and a prevailing will.
'Padre' is Spanish for 'father' and this is how we get
the word 'patriot.' More on this later . . .
In class, a teacher can talk, with students, about
essence and quintessence, the relationship between inspire and conspire (and
expire and respire - - - they all have to do with 'breath') and other words.
But I would like to talk briefly about the Greek word for 'anointed' which is
'chrism.' This word gives us another word, 'charisma.' Charisma is close to
character, to
charm (charm is about power and magic, not about the smarmy Eddie Haskell and
those like him) and Christmas. Charisma means when you walk into a room, people
notice. Like genius, you all have charisma. You just have to know it.
Students, this is WHO YOU ARE. You couldn't be dull if
you tried. That is, the truth of you will never be dull. Just turn on that lovelight as the old blues song says. What you have to say
is worthwhile, so just take the cover of off (or dis-cover)
your greatness, rub your magic lamp and let your genius out, turn on your lovelight . . .
ASSIGNMENT: We
read Lincoln's Gettysburgh Address in class. It is a
powerful, mournful, beautiful speech, simply written but one that speaks
volumes.
Imagine you
are the President of the United States. As you know, George W. bush has yet to
attend one funeral service for soldiers killed in Iraq. But you're different.
You are the president and you are going to give a speech honoring our dead.
What would you say? How would you honor that soldier's sacrifice? How would you
honor his greatness? How would you speak of our country's greatness?
You can take
any approach you wish. If you disapprove of this war, allow your opinion to
surface or don't. If you approve of the war, take the opposing view or don't.
In any case, write a 200-word eulogy for a soldier killed in Iraq. We will go
over details - - - for example, the battles in Fallujah, Baghdad and Samarra,
the lead-up to the war, world opinion and the motivation for the war.
THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND:
1. How this war relates to 9/11 or how it doesn't. Even
if there was no connection between Hussein and al Qaeda, 9/11 was some kind of
rationale for the war. Remember that;
2. Don't forget 'courage,' 'patriot,' 'inspire' (to
breathe into), 'magnificence' and all the words that are linked with them. You
realize your greatness and magnificence when you see these and honor them in
others;
3. WHY are you writing this eulogy? To whom are you
speaking? The soldier's parents? The
world? Our country only?
4. You may go over the 200-word limit but don't be too
windy. Less is more.
FOLLOW-UP:
ALL students are expected to read their eulogies in
class. But before we do that, you will be allowed, in fact, you will be
expected to revise your eulogies until you and I are satisfied. You may revise
your eulogies as many times as you wish. You must satisfy yourself before you
satisfy anyone else.
FINAL NOTE: If you just can't write something about this
war, then write a eulogy for an American soldier killed in Vietnam or in World
War II. Still, TRY to write one for an Iraqi War soldier. We will flesh this
out next class.
Good luck.
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Eng
309w
3.
10-18-04 Mini-lesson
My mini-lesson will be based on the idea of a “Muckraker.”
I will basically give them a brief overview/review of the past days materiel
about muckrakers.
Sense this is a historical topic the English majors in
the class may not be familiar with the topic so I will give them this
information to jog their memory.
Muckrakers-
the muckrakers were writers who, in the early 1900s, drew attention to social
problems and corruption in business and industry. They included novelists,
historians and journalists. Ida Tarbell, who exposed business corruption in her
History of the Standard Oil Company, was a leader in this movement. Among other
muckrakers were
Lincoln Steffens, who attacked political corruption in The Shame
of the Cities, and the novelist
Upton Sinclair. Sinclair’s novel The Jungle exposed appalling
conditions in the meatpacking industry. It prompted the first U.S. food laws.
My hope for the writing assignment is for the students within
the class to write as if they were a muckraker. For the setting I will be
telling them they are in a U.S. History class in high school. Their writing
assignment will to write an article for a local newspaper using the muckraker
platform. I would like them to write about an issue that they feel needs to be
“uncovered” to the public. After all this is what the muckrakers did, they uncovered
problems in industry and society. Possible issues could be: Organized sports
Problems in a
specific work place
Problems within
the school
Shady operations
(Ex. car salesman)
This is a list of
a few possibilities, many more exist, by no means are
you limited to the above. The students should write on a topic they feel
strongly about, for this will create the best most sincere work.
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4. Subject: [ENG309] ENG309 mini-lesson
I'm thinking of doing my mini-lesson on writing a
letter to the editor. This will be in a
Participation
in Government class. The unit will be about
participating in politics/current
issues/events. I'm
thinking that for homework I will have the
students
look up a current event or issue that they
have some
sort of feeling toward. Then, when they come to class
the next day, have them write a letter to
the editor
about it, including their opinion, not just
a summary
of the event or issue.
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5. The idea for my mini-teach is to have
my students
participate in a historical writing
exercise. It will allow
them to be creative, use the information
they learned in
class, and better their writing. Here's the assignment:
For this exercise you must assume the identity of a
person
who has lived through the progressive
movement in the early
20th century. The
person could be yourself or a fictional
character.
(If you choose to use an actual historical
figure, be sure you know enough about
them.) Identify who
you are, where you live, your occupation,
etc. You are to
write a 1-2 page diary or journal entry
describing your life
and society around you. What kind of events are taking
place?
Are you working to make society better, or are you
happy with its current state? Include any historical
details that you find relevant, but be
creative! Have fun
with this, but remember that you are using
the assignment to
show your knowledge and understanding of
19th-century
American history.
I would use it to foster writing in either 8th or 11th
grade, as it would fit with the NYS
curriculum.
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6. My proposal will be focused on essay
structure using
the three phase writing proces. I will define phase one,
two and three. After i give the
definition for the phases
i will ask the students
to do a freewrite
on a contraversal
subject. When they are done we will discuss the pros and
cons of the topic, as i display them on the board. which
ever side develops more thouroughly
is going to be the side
the essay will be
written on. This activity should give
the student an example of
how to write a structured essay.
after the activity i will show and give examples of phase
1, 2, and 3.
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7. American History 11th
grade
Students have completed reading on the cold
war. As a follow up, the
students will then free write
for five minutes discussing the power of perceptions
and ideology over normally
rational people. Can people be blinded by
propoganda, and rhetoric? Students will then thoughtfully discuss their
ideas as a class.
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8. This lesson is designed to teach 12th
grade Participation in Government students the skill of writing
"political" poetry. Previous
lessons will have focused on reading political poetry, and ideally, these same
students would be taking an English elective in creative writing or
poetry. An interdisciplinary approach
combining social studies and English language arts would therefore be
appropriate for this activity.
Students will begin this lesson engaging in freewriting to facilitate idea generation. The students will be able to write in any
form
of poetry that they choose - haiku,
limericks, sonnets, free verse, cinquains, etc. We
will have read examples of each, and I will model the process of writing such
poems.
The poems can be satirical, or they can be heartfelt and
sincere. They can use subtle metaphors,
or they can be bitter diatribes. They
can express anger at injustice, or they can extol the virtues of America. The main point of the exercise is for
students to increase their skills in expressing their honest (and informed)
opinions about current events and issues, and also to recognize that there is a
fine line in such writing between personal opinion and propaganda.
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9. Students will find an
article in the newspaper, or a magazine like Time or
Newsweek. They will have to read the article, and
answer the who, what, why,
where, when of the article,
and identify the subject of the article and key
ideas. Using the information they gather from the
article, they will then have to
rewrite the article in their
own words. The skills involved with this
exercise are summarizing,
information gathering, and investigating.
It shouldn't
take more than 10 or 15
minutes as long as the rewrites are kept short.
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10. Mini-Lesson Grade 8 or Grade 11
Standards 1,2,3,4,5
This lesson should take place during Social
Studies Unit III,
Industrialization of the United States, Section III
Adjusting Society to Industrialism: American
People and Places.
The focus of this lesson is to review the section’s
material which deals with topics such as Immigration, Social Darwinism,
Urbanization, Child Labor, and
emerging Family Patterns.
The instructor will read to the students TWO separate
passages. The first from Upton
Sinclair’s The Jungle
and the second from the book So Far from Home.
The passages will
focus on the immigrant experience as an introduction to the lesson.
Students will be placed in groups of 4. Each student in the group will have ONE of
the following pictures on their desk: 1.) Tenement
Building 2.)
Child Worker 3.)
A picture of a typical working family 4.)
The American Federation of Labor emblem.
Students will then be asked to look at their picture and
use it to develop a story. Each student
will be given 4 minutes to begin writing about the
picture in front of them. At the end of the 4 minutes each student will
pass their picture to the group member to their right. The students will then add to
the story using the new picture in front
of them. This will be continued until all
students have their original picture back in front of them.
Students will be asked to share what they have written
with the class.
This will be a good review of the previously learned
material. The pictures are to act as
guides for students to fictionalize the time period and to draw
upon their knowledge of the course
material.
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11. Mini lesson
I
plan on doing my mini lesson with a WWII DBQ.
I have question to help
analyze the documents and these
will lead to organizing the final essay.
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12. Students will find an
article in a newspaper or a magazine like Time or
Newsweek. they will have to
identify the subject, as well as the who, what, where, when,
why, how?'s in the article.
Then after putting the article away, they will have to rewrite
the article in their own
words using only the information they found themselves.
this exercise will involve skills
in summarizing, collecting and organizing, and investigation.
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13. OBJECTIVES: Students will construct a newspaper that describes
local, state, national and international events on the day
they were born.
ACTIVITIES: The students will begin the class by doing a free
write about what are the most important aspects of
writing a newspaper story and what are the
most important sources that can be used to find out what happened on their
birthday. This way they can organize their
strategies as to how they will approach this assignment using skills and
techniques they have already learned.
Goals: Students will write a newspaper article using different
sources while they stregthen their writing skills
using free-writing methods.
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14. I plan to do a five-line composition
with students in groups of five.
Each group of students will be given a prompt. The first member will write the
first sentence then pass the page to the next member and so on until each member
has written their
sentence. Each sentence must relate to
the prompt. This
will show students the value
of collaborative writing.
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15. Mini-Journals
With this lesson, students will employ the critical
Social Studies concept, empathy, by creating single mock-journal
submissions.
This will be done amidst an ongoing reading of one of the Dear America
series of historic novels. It will
take about a week to read the book. At the
beginning of the week, each student will choose a main character from one of
the other Dear America books. Each day, after class reading is done, students
will then write a mock journal entry for
the character they choose. Students cannot read the book their character
is based on. They are only given the
character’s age, gender, socio-economic
situation, country of origin, and a general idea of the plot of the book.
Students must apply their knowledge of Social Studies to create
their journal entries, to be written from a
first-person perspective. At the end of the week, students will then
begin reading the book in which the character they
chose is featured. The eventual goal of
this is to compare and contrast the mock journal entries they wrote with the
entries in the books. They would then write an essay detailing that
compare/contrast process. The essay will
follow a rubric to check for overt understanding. Once this is done, students can go back and
revise their journal
entries to include things they may have
learned by reading the books, or take out things that don’t belong. Students
who have special needs and/or great
difficulty with writing tasks can perform similar tasks, such as participating
in a
group that creates journal entries, drawing
pictures of what their character encounters, or even dictating into a tape
recorder rather than write. My class will have participated in free-writing
and mock journal exercises often through the
year, so this sort of activity will be a
familiar one.
Total time for this will be about three weeks, including
the class reading of the book, the reading of their own
books,
essay and journal revision. However, only the first week will take part
in class, as the rest will be done at home,
with periodic teacher guidance and
feedback in class through the following weeks.
When I present my mini-lesson, I will simply do the background
of one character for everyone in the class to
write one journal entry for. Rubric and any other lesson materials will
probably be handed out to give class a better
idea of what I would be trying to
accomplish.
Bloom’s levels: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application,
Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation.
Social Studies Standards:
1. History
of United States and New York
2. World
History
3. Geography
4. Economics
Louis Rath’s Thinking Skills:
All, as this assignment demands a litany of critical thinking skills,
reasoning,
predicting, creating, and even self-criticism in
the end.
The Dear America series of books is a series of
historical fiction books written in journal style, designed to get
students to relate to the experiences of early
Americans and immigrants.
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16. The background info - students are
working in peer-editing writing workshops to complete a paper based on a
self-selected reading. They have an editing guide sheet that helps them focus
on what editing is and how it works. Based on submitted drafts, I would focus
different mini-lessons on common problems/issues. Examples used in the
mini-lessons could either come from students' writing or from readings we've
done in class.
One possible mini-lesson - focusing on 3 points from their
editing guide sheet (tightening and
linking/clarifying and sharpening/listening for pace and
rhythm) - review the concept of sentence combining
and how it can improve writing. Do a
couple of examples as a class. Then, in their writing groups,
have students complete 1 exercise from a
common set written on the board. Share results with the whole
class. Finally, in their writing groups,
have students review each other's papers looking for areas that
might be improved by sentence combining.
Approached on different levels, I think this could work
in any secondary (ELA or social studies) class
that participates in writing workshops. It
allows the teacher to focus on problems the students are
currently experiencing, and by linking it to
their own writing it makes it relevant and they see how they can
apply the lesson immediately (which makes
it valuable to them.)
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