Day 2 Prior Knowledge

OMG!!! The Day 2 lesson for small group work on establishing the definition and qualities of a hero went fabulously. I totally wish that you had been at the school today.

 

 I introduced the lesson Monday with a review of plot, characterization, point of view, theme, and setting. From there, we discussed a couple popular films that they had all seen and applied the terms to them. Then, the students branched out into groups of two and practiced summarization [modeled on Monday] using the movies and the terms as the basis for their summaries. Today, we started class by redefining what a character is and then moved into a class discussion on the following items: protagonists, antagonists, character motives, internal/external conflicts, primary/secondary characters, static/dynamic characters, and archetypes.  When the groups got started, I was happy to hear that they were using the terms that we had discussed. Some students got animated and were pretending to be superheroes at their desks, which made me giggle on the inside.

 

The kids were on point, not getting off task. I planned for this portion of the lesson to take 45 minutes, but they were doing so well [and having conversations that were so involved] that I let them go way over. Several of the students asked if they were going to learn like that all semester. I'm guessing that they felt that they got a lot out of today. I am super excited about the rest of this unit. 

 

 Attached to this email are the small group seminar forms that I created to give direction to what I wanted them to get out of the mini-seminars. I also took pictures of a follow up activity that I quickly made up to segue us into tomorrow's lesson. I will forward them to you soon.