Heh...I started fiddling with lesson plans today as well.
I have a REALLY hard time getting kids to read at home. Whenever I have an assignment with home-reading or a novel, I get tons and tons of students simply failing the assignment or unit. It depresses the hell out of me. A colleague has students take notes on *everything*, and I need to talk to him about this technique--how he teaches them to annotate and such.
Still, kids not doing their work shouldn't be a reason not to assign it. Some advice I *did* give my student teacher right off the bat--whatever classwork you have kids do after a reading assignment, make sure it's not a group assignment or whole-class discussion/activity that relies on most of the kids having read the material. It will crash and burn. :(
I always do Beowulf aloud, with the explanation that it was oral tradition in the first place. I also do Macbeth aloud for similar reasons, and it's also easier to break into for explanations (I switch who reads the parts each scene).
I generally do grammar at the beginning of every class period, and fit in writing whenever I've assigned something. Since the writing usually builds off of the themes in the lit, that's what it will cut into.
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Date: 2010-08-03 09:33 pm (UTC)I have a REALLY hard time getting kids to read at home. Whenever I have an assignment with home-reading or a novel, I get tons and tons of students simply failing the assignment or unit. It depresses the hell out of me. A colleague has students take notes on *everything*, and I need to talk to him about this technique--how he teaches them to annotate and such.
Still, kids not doing their work shouldn't be a reason not to assign it. Some advice I *did* give my student teacher right off the bat--whatever classwork you have kids do after a reading assignment, make sure it's not a group assignment or whole-class discussion/activity that relies on most of the kids having read the material. It will crash and burn. :(
I always do Beowulf aloud, with the explanation that it was oral tradition in the first place. I also do Macbeth aloud for similar reasons, and it's also easier to break into for explanations (I switch who reads the parts each scene).
I generally do grammar at the beginning of every class period, and fit in writing whenever I've assigned something. Since the writing usually builds off of the themes in the lit, that's what it will cut into.