I think that this ten day unit will be the first ten days of teaching To Kill a Mockingbird. This novel is often times taught in middle school. Therefore, my lessons will cater to an eighth grade inner-city class of mixed ability levels. Since I do not yet know my students, I will modify my orginal plans to meet any special needs that they may have.
Since this plan will be both about a piece of literature as well as film, I will use a variety of technidques to meet my learning goals. In this unit I will combine the reading of To Kill a Mockingbird with it's film counterpart. In addition, Iplan to use other films to demonstrate characters representations such as hero, villian, antagoonist, protagonist, etc.
The first day of the unit, students will be introduced to basic film shots including the close-up, medium-shot, and long shot. They will also be introduced to story boarding. During the unit we will read scenes in the novel, discuss appropriate shot types, story board a few shots, and then see how the film makers ultimately ended up shooting the shot. Toward the end of the second week, students will storyboard approxiamately two minutes worth of shots from scenes in the book. These storyboards will be shared with the class to promote public speaking skills.
Assessment will include reviewing students' in class work, discussions about the readings, journal entries, and a final presentation of the two minute's worth of story board. There will also be written quizzes to provide feedback to me as an instructor as to what needs the students still have in order to own the concepts explored in class. This will be a unit centered around the student and driven by the text.
I will need some technology for this unit. This will be limited to TV, DVD player, and DVDs. In addition, I will scaffold this text with vocabulary exercises in order to fully promote the richness of the writing.
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Hey William: The use of the media/film technique to help students "see the text" is a great start. You can think about the timing of the use of the film too, and if you want to have the students do other engaging media-based activities to help them move through the reading. I'm wondering if there is some way we can be very specific about letting the kids know that these processes can be used to understand other texts too, that this is a way of "reading" that can be transferred. Junior high students are not always the first to catch on to those metacognitive ideas,but it's worth a try, anyway.
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