I’m such a geek when it comes to teaching. Two weeks after the school year concludes, I’m ready to start again. Since I can’t have a classroom full of students to teach, I go back and revise and adapt my curriculum lessons during July and August. This year I have some more revisions to make, [...]

With my Sophomore Honors students, the final unit remaining is the persuasive speech unit. Generally, the students do quite well with these 3-5 minute speeches, and I require the following: three types of sources (i.e. periodical, internet source, survey, scientific study, interview, etc.), a minimum of eight solid facts, an anecdote on the ...

Two novels I taught this year were To Kill A Mockingbird and A Gathering of Old Men. Prior to and during reading these novels, I had the kids look at some songs, poems, and historical context. Here are a few of my favorite things concerning the race relations in the novels. Prior to reading To Kill [...]

Today we started the film The Matrix and the kids are enthralled. What a great feeling to know they are learning the literary devices and analyzing while enjoying the process. Also, I introduced the double-entry journal, the Christ-like character attributes, and the heroic cycle. Everyone dove right in to the the work. While watching the film I ...

I purchased some movie units from Michael Vetrie, an alternative high school teacher in Sun Valley, CA, and I’m going to try one tomorrow. I will show The Matrix in half-hour segments, so the students can do the following: compose a double-entry journal, study the film using literary terms, analyze critical quotations in the novel plot how ...

When teaching denotation and connotation I use numerous poems in addition to the literature we are reading (The Crucible’s use of “cold” is an excellent example if you are reading it, which we just were). Here are three I use with my classes: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Eagle” (also great for alliteration) He ...

To follow my previous post, here is another exercise I use with my students regarding adjectives. First, I put a list of words on the board all synonymous with “angry:” mad, upset, incensed, perturbed, enraged, disgusted, indignant, annoyed, peeved, infuriated, provoked, and irate. If I have the time I sometimes give each small group ...

One of the first sets of literary devices I teach at any level is connotation and denotation. These are two of the most basic diction analysis techniques for students to learn since they are wide-reaching and allow students to discover tone, mood, inferences, and more. Denotation (the primary definition of a word) and connotation (the [...]

I took a few pictures of projects for the end of The Great Gatsby unit. Each pair of students had to create an artistic rendition based on a quotation (Eckleburg’s eyes were popular) with an explanation, a sonnet connecting three characters, three essay question answers, and everything compiled into a display of some sort. Here are a few ...

A while ago I mentioned that I had my students research topics for the era in which our novels take place. We then used their findings to create visually pleasing bulletin boards. The requirements were: to include at least one image for each researched item, to type up a 6-8 sentence description or history for each selected item, to cite each ...