NCTE - Middle Lessons

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Middle Lessons

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Literary Characters on Trial: Combining Persuasion and Literary Analysis
Using characters from a piece of literature, students choose and portray characters and relevant situations then use textual evidence to try the character in a mock trial. Students exercise their oral and written persuasion skills by playing a role in a mock trial of a literary character. The class will act as a jury for the literary trial.

Developing Reading Plans to Support Independent Reading
This lesson plan asks students to identify books they have read recently, and look for patterns connecting those that they enjoyed the most. Once they've analyzed their past readings, students complete a reading plan, a simple wish list of books they hope to read in the future, based on their preferences in the past. The finished list becomes another supporting resource to guide independent readers.

Analyzing Advice as an Introduction to Shakespeare
Popular culture provides an introduction to Shakespeare’s poetic devices in this lesson, which asks students to explore an excerpt from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Book Report Alternative: Creating Careers for Characters
What if one of the characters in the book you've been reading was looking for a job? This question is the focus of this activity which bridges technical writing and literary analysis by inviting students to become characters in a novel they have read, find a job for those characters, and write application letters and resumes for their assumed persona.

Book Report Alternative: Character and Author Business Cards
When students make business cards for characters in books they've read or for the authors of those books, they're forced to think symbolically in order to create a short, simple text that represents the target appropriately—providing a title, relevant images, and other pertinent information.

Get the Reel Scoop: Comparing Books to Movies
In today’s culture, students are bombarded with movies based upon literature. Instead of assuming that students will watch the movie rather than reading the book, take advantage of the phenomena by asking students to compare and contrast books with their movie counterparts and write for variety of authentic purposes.

Choose Your Own Adventure: A Hypertext Writing Experience
Working in groups, students will read and analyze Choose Your Own Adventure Stories in text or hypertext format and brainstorm to develop setting, characters, and beginning plots for their own adventures. Working in smaller groups and finally individually, students will develop Choose Your Own Adventure Story Web sites.

Investigating the Holocaust: A Collaborative Inquiry Project
As students progress though this inquiry project, they explore a variety of resources—texts, images, sounds, photos, and other artifacts—as they learn about the Holocaust. Working collaboratively, they investigate the materials, prepare response to share orally with the class, and produce a topic-based newspaper to complete their research.

Reading and Analyzing Multigenre Texts
In this lesson plan, students develop a definition of multigenre texts by exploring a multigenre picture book, short chapter books, and, if desired, multigenre novels. Students will brainstorm alone and together what they will need as readers to read and understand multigenre texts successfully. The students will share findings and discuss strategies needed to comprehend, and by extension to write, these texts.

Picture Books as Framing Texts: Research Paper Strategies for Struggling Writers
In this lesson, picture books give students frames for structuring research projects, freeing them from the language of their encyclopedia sources and allowing them to focus their attention on the content of their papers. Using picture books as models, students are able to think more about what to say and less about how to say it, which leads to better learning experiences and better writing.

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