Lesson Plan

Basic Information
My lesson plan is designed for high-level, middle school students in the 3rd Grade (16 years old).  I made this lesson plan as part of both my work for this class and Douglas' reading class. 


This lesson was taught in 3 x 45 minute periods.  This class was an extra class therefore the students were high level only and the groups had no more than ten students in each.


Lesson Goals 
My goal was to encourage an oppositional reading from students through removing elements that may lead them to come to a particular or desired conclusion.  As the received reading is not clear, students had to work to create their own answers.  I also wanted to encourage them to reflect on how they imagined the story as they did and understand how they may interpret things differently based on their own experiences and identities. 


I did not focus on any language function or structure.  However, I was trying to encourage my students to use top-down reading strategies with the final passage, therefore I limited the use of dictionaries and gave them a time limit for completing the reading.   


Lesson Plan and Activities
The students were initially given a short extract from a story (handout 1). In the extract, all names and personal pronouns were removed so that students weren’t given any information about the characters.

They were required to read the extract in pairs and then write a description of the four characters (W, X, Y and Z) including age, gender, race and job (handout 3), as well as answering four questions (handout 2).   They were reminded that this was not a creative writing exercise and to answer the questions based on the initial thoughts they had when reading the extract.  As they were working in pairs the studens had to justify their answers to each other and come up with the one that they thought the most likely and give reasons as to why. 

Students then presented their ideas to the rest of the group, giving reasons for their choices and compared similarities and differences. 

Once they had given their ideas about the story, students read the real story from which the extract was taken (handout 4-6). Then students answered the four questions again using the real story and compared these to their own answers. 

Students then compared their answers to the real story and took part in a discussion as to why their answers were so similar/different (all the students’ answers were different to the story when I did this in my classes).

Once they knew the characters they completed the character chart again (race, gender, age, job) and then were given the real pictures (handout 7). Again they discussed the reasons for their answers and surprise (or, in some cases, lack of) at the real character pictures. 

Reflections

There were times when the students struggled to express what they meant due to a limited language ability, which (as they told me) was both frustrating and difficult for them. However, their ideas were interesting and perceptive and their reflections at every stage were both insightful and thoughtful.

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