The following are a few lesson plans from my Detective Fiction Unit and my Kite Runner Unit.
Detective Fiction Unit Lesson 4: How is the plot of a detective story organized?
Once I taught the lesson to one section of the 11th grade, I realized that the language of the detective story was too difficult to read as a DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) assignment. The short story "My Queer Dean" is archaic and uses complex sentence structure which makes silent reading difficult for the students. For my next section, I rewrote the assignment and taught it with the revisions. The second file is the graphic organizer to accompany the lesson. Doing the reading aloud made the story much easier to understand because I could stop the class to ask questions and assess the students' comprehension. Detective Fiction Unit Lesson 4.docx Detective Fiction Unit Lesson 4 Handout 1.docx
Detective Fiction Unit Lesson 8: How can we represent the various aspects of the detective genre in “The Interrogation”?
This lesson is a Choice Board activity based on the short story, "The Interrogation." The students were provided with four categories of questions, and were required to choose one question from each category to answer. They worked in pairs in order to answer three short response questions and one creative assignment. This lesson worked very well and the students were engaged in the activity for the entire class period. They were very eager to share their work and drawings at the end of the period. Detective Fiction Unit Lesson 8.docx
Kite Runner Unit Lesson 7:
This lesson is about two specific passages found in pages 80-84 of The Kite Runner. During these scenes, the reader is shown the extent of the tensions between fathers and sons in this novel. The students analyzed these tensions by writing a creative piece retelling the passage from a different character's perspective. The students were not interested in the conversation at first because they did not understand my warm up. Once I rephrased the question, I was able to receive responses relating the students' experiences to our lesson. Kite Runner Unit Lesson 7.docx
