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Objectives
Activities
Teaching literature – reading comprehension (text: Walden by Thoreau)
1. What details do you remember regarding Thoreau's house at the pond?
2. Thoreau writes about morning as his favorite time of day. What is his reasoning? Do you agree
or disagree?
3. What do you know about the reasons for Thoreau being at Walden Pond? What do you want to
know more about?
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If you were making a film of this text, what actor would you cast to play the main character?
Why?
How does this short text compare with the text we read yesterday? What are the similarities? The
differences?
If you could interview the author of this text, what would you ask?
Fishbowl
It is a discussion technique that focuses attention on a small group discussing in an inner circle
while the rest of the class listens and takes notes from their position in the outer circle. This
technique is sometimes called "fishbowl" (see Baloche et al. 1993). The idea is for a small group
of students to discuss while their peers listen in. Again, students are instructed in how to prepare
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for the conversation. I set up the room so a small group of five to seven students is in the center
and places for the remaining students surround this inner group.
The teacher selects the first "inside" group and ask them to take seats in the inner circle. The
"outside" students are instructed to take notes on the conversation they hear. Students are
informed that they will be using the notes they take when they switch roles with the inside group,
so it is important that they be good listeners. Depending on the size of the class, the teacher will
have multiple rotations of the inside and outside groups. Each student in the class is a member of
the inside group once. The inside group students are told that once they have spoken in the inside
group, they need to wait until their fellow group members speak before they can speak again.
Teaching Setting
Writers draw on place and time to establish setting. Students often overlook setting, looking
instead at the who and what of the story. This activity is designed in order to raise students’
awareness of the importance of setting, to see how it frames the story and provides insight into
the characters, plot, and theme. The teacher selects stories with well-developed settings and ask
students to focus on how the author creates the setting, looking in particular at place, time period,
and time of year.
The teacher provides students with sheets of paper and crayons or markers and invites them to
sketch, draw, or note the images and words that the author uses to create setting.
To build on the music connection, students are encouraged to think about how they might use
music or sound effects if they were making film based on the story.
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Teaching Plot
What happened? As students delve into short stories the teacher asks them to notice how the
story unfolds. What are the tensions? The conflicts? What happens to change or resolve the
conflicts or tensions? Is the conclusion surprising? Satisfying? Unresolved? Provide textual
evidence (words and phrases, quotes).
After this analysis, which can be done in writing or as a small-group discussion, each group selects
the top five events and discusses why they made these selections, being prepared to explain the
group's answer with support from the text.
Variation: What happened? Who was involved? Did this event have a significant effect on a
character or characters? (e.g., require him or her to act, make a decision, change a decision, see a
situation with a new eyes). Provide textual evidence (words and phrases, quotes).
Foreshadowing
"Hints or clues of what is to come later in the story" is the definition of foreshadowing.
Teaching Strategy: Reading Like a Detective
To support the discovery of the secret between reader and author, the teacher relies on two
readings of the story. In the case of foreshadowing, students are asked to read like detectives,
noting places that contained important clues. In support of this "detective reading", the teacher
provides students with sticky arrow-shaped flags and note cards.
Then students gather in investigative groups, and they review their flagged sections, looking for
common patterns among group members.
They reread the story in the group with an eye to the clues they had identified as key and write
these key clues on note cards. After investigative groups determine their clues, they regroup as a
class and share the note card clues. From this discussion, they identify how the author used
foreshadowing in support of character, plot, conflict, and even theme.
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about whether the narrator is limited in his or her point of view; to think about how the story
might be different if told from a different point of view. My hope is that students will see that
point of view controls what we know as readers.
(Source: Less Is More: Teaching Literature with Short Texts, Grades 6–12 by Kimberly Hill
Campbell. Copyright © 2007. Stenhouse Publishers)