Category Archives: English Language Arts

In the fourth or fifth year of my teaching career here in New York, I put together on the fly a unit on writing reviews. The students to whom I presented it received it well. They wrote cogent, interesting reviews. I resolved to develop the unit further. Then, as with so many things floating around in my data warehouse, I never had the chance to use it again. So, it languished.

Happily, over the past couple of years, when a bit of spare time presented itself, I resumed work on developing this material. I’ve now fashioned it into a seven-lesson unit, and each lesson will be forthcoming in the next seven weeks. These lessons, in other words, will be the Weekly Texts for the next seven weeks. They’ll take the blog most of the way through the summer of 2025.

Let’s begin with the unit plan, along with a shorter simple outline of the lessons only if you find that useful.

Next up are the the worksheet template and the the lesson-plan template.

Along the way I accumulated a lot of documents that may or may not be appropriate for revising or expanding–or both–this unit. Here is the list of aesthetic criteria to drive analysis and criticism of whatever art form has chosen to review; this will turn up again in the fourth lesson on establishing aesthetic criteria. Depending on how far a student reviewing film wants to go, this glossary of critical film terms might be useful. Finally, where aggregated text is concerned, from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Hirsch, E.D., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil.New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), here is a list of terms from do-now exercises for this unit. This last document is more in the way of a learning support, I suppose.

And here is a list of all the do-now exercises I pulled aside for this unit. I haven’t included all of them, but rather pulled aside the ones I thought most vital to the focus of the unit. I’ll include the one I’ve included in the lesson, then two other freestanding posts with a do-now exercise from the list.

And that is it for this week. Everything here is formatted in Microsoft Word and open to your edits so that you can adjust this material to the needs of your students. Lesson one appears next week.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.