Category Archives: Lesson Plans

This category identifies a post with several documents, which will include a lesson plan, and may include a short exercise to being the class (known in the New York City Department of Education as a “do-now”) a worksheet, often scaffolded, a teacher’s copy of the worksheet, and a learning support of some kind.

The Weekly Text, April 1, 2016: A Lesson Plan on Alain Resnais’ Holocaust Documentary “Night and Fog”

Posted on April 1, 2016 | Leave a comment

Some years ago, I began working to build a unit that guided struggling learners through the process of writing a synthetic research paper. I knew it would have to be highly structured into a scaffold form, and would need to guide students through the process of postulating an argument, researching and reading, evaluating evidence, outlining, and citing sources in Modern Language Association style. Since our sophomore research paper topic at the time was the Holocaust, I designed my highly structured research paper unit around that dismal period of European history.

I’ve actually floated a book proposal to a small educational publisher for this unit; they passed, which persuaded me the unit requires more work before it’s publishable. Since then,  I’ve worked on refining this sprawling unit.

Do you know Alain Renais’ documentary on the Holocaust, Night and Fog? I first saw it as a student at Ray F. Sennett Middle School in Madison, Wisconsin, and it shocked me; indeed, it was one of those educational “before and after” (like reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X or Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown) moments for me. Early on in planning this unit, I knew this film–which packs an amazing amount of information (and a number of shocking images) into its 32 minute running time–would serve as the opening lesson.

Here then is a complete lesson to attend a viewing of Night and Fog.

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.

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The Weekly Text, January 8, 2016: A Lesson Plan on Teaching the Ordinal Centuries

Posted on January 8, 2016 | Leave a comment

Over the years, I have seen students suffer persistent confusion over the difference between the cardinal (counting numbers) and ordinal (numbers that place things in rank or order) numbers historians, and therefore social studies teachers, use to name and number centuries. It goes without saying, I assume, that a lack of understanding of this basic means of understanding historical time leads to confusion about the scope, sequence and, indeed, sweep of history. Understanding this discourse is by any standard, I should think, necessary for any basic understanding of what is going on in a social studies classroom.

Yet, I have not seen this way of understanding historical time taught explicitly in my thirteen years as a social studies/English/special education teacher.

So, fresh from Mark’s Text Terminal for the New Year, here is a complete lesson plan on teaching the ordinal centuries. Under this link you’ll find a lesson plan, two context clues for the noun phrase cardinal number and the adjective ordinal (and you may want to take a look at the Focus on One Word Worksheets Users’ Manual to work with those), and a scaffolded worksheet.

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.

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The Weekly Text, December 18, 2015: A Lesson Plan on Using Conjunctions

Posted on December 18, 2015 | Leave a comment

Here is the final Weekly Text of 2015. I plan to avoid, to the greatest extent possible over the holiday break, this computer screen. I’ve just completed the final piece of my cycle of units on the parts of speech, an eight-lesson unit on conjunctions (I’ve previously posted the learning support on the most commonly used conjunctions that you’ll very likely need to use the material on this post).

So,  here is the second lesson on conjunctions from this unit, which gives struggling students some structured and independent practice at using the coordinating conjunctions. While this Word document includes the lesson plan, first do-now exercise (a homophone worksheet which you may need the Homophone Worksheets Users’ Manual to use), a structured worksheet, and a teacher’s answer key, it does not include the second do-now worksheet, an Everyday Edit on Beethoven. Incidentally, if you like this Everyday Edit, you can find more of them at the Education World Everyday Edits page, where the folks who operate that site generously give them away as tear-offs.

That’s it! I wish you and yours a joyous holiday season. I’ll see you again in the New Year.

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.

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The Weekly Text, November 20, 2015: A Lesson Plan on Malapropisms

Posted on November 20, 2015 | Leave a comment

As I understand it, one of the most difficult things for English language learners to understand and master are the manifold idioms in the language, particularly in American English. While my knowledge of this is anecdotal (among other things, I hear that’s the part of the ESL test on which students fare most poorly), not the best kind of evidence for any kind of conclusion about this problem area of instruction, I don’t have any trouble imagining that some of the struggling learners I work with would find it a challenge to deal with the figurative and abstract aspects of idioms in American English.

So I have become interested in the idiom as a way of teaching figurative language, and to teach the difference between figurative and literal language. I’m somewhat circumspect about posting this first lesson from a unit that I’ve provisionally titled “How Not to Talk Like the Guys in ‘Dumb and Dumber'” for a couple of reasons. First, I thereby admit that I’ve watched both the “Dumb and Dumber” movies a sufficient number of times to have had them inspire me to develop instructional material–something that doesn’t quite fit the cut of the intellectual jib (to pervert an idiom slightly)  I seek to present on Mark’s Text Terminal. The other reason is that this lesson, and the other four I’m working on for this short unit, combine instruction on idioms with material, which in this first lesson is only implied, on malapropisms.

Anyway, I’d like to hear from you if this is something you’ve found useful per se, or if you modified it for your students and how, or if you think it is just silly. My students did, but they also learned to understand and use an extremely common idiom in American English, which is prior knowledge I believe they can call up to understand and use other idioms.

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.

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The Weekly Text, November 13, 2015: A Lesson Plan on the Elements of a Declarative Sentence

Posted on November 13, 2015 | Leave a comment

For the second year, as I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I have struggled to assemble a structured and scaffolded unit on writing the five-paragraph essay for the eight-week special institute class required of freshmen in my school. The premise of the exercise–that all there is to be learned about composing five-paragraph essays–and therefore, I guess, all essays–can be learned in eight class meetings has always struck me as…well, to put it as charitably as possible, problematic. This approach is especially problematic for the struggling learners I serve.

So, I’ve worked at creating a unit that leads students who struggle with writing and reading, and don’t really understand the elements of grammatically complete sentence, to an understanding of how to write expository prose. My own sense remains that for the students I work with, this material would be best presented seriatim in daily classroom sessions rather than once a week, and that it should be presented one step at a time over two eight-lesson units rather than one. The five-paragraph essay is not the only form of expository writing students will need to learn, so why not make that form part of a broader and deeper strategy on teaching writing?

When I went through the first unit just now, I found that I hadn’t made the kind of progress on it that I’d hoped. In any case, I think these units will undergo revision each time I use them to meet the need the students I work with. On that note, here is a lesson on the elements of a declarative sentence, the first from my unit on writing the five-paragraph essay.

N.B., please, that in several of the sentence setups in exercises one through eight have a series of asterisks where the subject should be. This is so you may, if you choose, insert names of your students for use as subjects, and the same is true of the parsing sentences do-now work that opens the lesson. Please see the About Weekly Texts page for the rationale behind this.

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.

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The Weekly Text, October 2, 2015: A Lesson Plan on Genocide

Posted on October 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

We teachers in Lower Manhattan are fortunate to have the Museum of Jewish Heritage–A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in our precincts, and in most cases within walking distance. The Museum is diverse (as I write this, it is running an exhibition on design called “Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism”) but its Core Exhibition addresses the 100-year-or-so period in Europe, and the Jewish experience there, surrounding the Holocaust.

The Museum is generous with opportunities for New York City public schools to attend exhibits and educational programs. Their programs are sophisticated and students report back, even those alienated from school, that they found the experience quite meaningful.

This is a reading and writing lesson on genocide designed to equip students with prior knowledge of a key concept that will enable them to better understand the context of their museum visit. There are two do-now exercises, so if you’re unfamiliar with their use, you’ll need the Focus on One Word Worksheets Users’ Manual as well as the explanation of asterisks in the About Weekly Texts page on the banner above this entry. Although I originally taught this as a stand-alone special topic lesson, I have incorporated it into a larger Freshman Global Studies unit, so the lesson plan lacks standards to rationalize it. Again, if you look at the About Weekly Texts page, you’ll find typescripts (from which you can copy and paste standards) of the complete English Language Arts and Social Studies Common Core Standards.

Genocide is nobody’s idea of a pleasant topic for conversation;  United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power has aptly called it it, in her book of the same name, “a problem from hell.” As context for a visit to A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, a relatively deep understanding of genocide and its impetuses is de rigeur. This lesson, I hope, will help students develop their own understanding of that context.

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.

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The Weekly Text, September 18, 2015: A Lesson Plan on the Executive Skills and the Medieval Commonplace Book

Posted on September 18, 2015 | 2 comments

Students with learning challenges almost invariably present to their teachers with executive skills issues. How might teachers in their content areas, while conveying the facts and skills on which students will be tested, build opportunities into our lessons for students to have useful experiences in learning to organize themselves? Since some colleagues and I conducted a professional inquiry into executive skills a few years back, the possibility of this kind of synthetic unit, using abstract content to teach concrete, real-world living skills has nagged at me. This Weekly Text is a prototype for the kind of learning activity I imagine. I use the word prototype deliberately. I have never used this lesson on the commonplace book in the classroom.

We expect students to manage larger and larger amounts information, but at least at the school in which I work, we offer no formal instruction or training to assist students in discovering and developing their own methods of organization. For students with even mild executive skills challenges, this is a devastating omission. But what would we use to teach organization, and how?

You can click through the link above to learn the basics on the commonplace book from Wikipedia’s good page (from which I was edified to learn that by “the seventeenth century, commonplacing had become a recognized practice that was formally taught to college students”). Fortunately, cloud computing gives students and teachers a variety of formats in which to start a digital-age commonplace book. Evernote and Dropbox are two of the better-known places to start and maintain a commonplace book.

I don’t know your school’s policy is on smartphones, but both Evernote and Dropbox offer apps on the major mobile applications platforms. I believe that the smartphone has potential to serve as a powerful learning adjunct for struggling learners. If your school permits the use of smartphones in the classroom (mine, for reasons that strike me as both foolish and ignorant, if that’s possible, doesn’t), then this lesson has room to help students learn to use their smartphones to aid them in their school work in both learning and organization.

So, the Commonplace Book Lesson Plan is a reading and writing lesson that introduces students to the concept of keeping information (at least at the beginning) in one place. I expect as I begin using this lesson, I’ll find ways it might be adjusted or adapted for greater sophistication and complexity, e.g. teaching students to create, use and organize useful filing systems, so that it can be used along a continuum that matches students’ abilities.

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.

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