Essential Questions:
- What is literature?
- What ways do critical readers approach literature?
- What are the different styles and structures to look for in classic and contemporary literature?
- What value does literature have for our lives?
Literature Circle Assignments
To set up for our final days with this first literature circle book we will...
1. Create an "Open Topic" prompt using the style of one of the prompts from the last five years. See examples here. Also as a group write five multiple choice prompts based on a single passage using the five different question types, use this page to help you. Your multiple choice questions will be based on your class period and should be formatted like the example seen here submitted typed in 12 pt. Arial only, one group member will submit to Edmodo group:
P.1: Beginning 1/4 of the book
P.2: 2nd 1/4,
P.5 3rd 1/4
P.6 Ending
2.Final group presentation and reflection paper.
3. Turn in "Literature Circle" notes, "Major Works Data Sheet" and take the Open Topic/ M.C. test on your novel.
Disclaimer: This will all be scheduled in the coming weeks in the midst of personal statement work, wrapping up short stories and beginning Frankenstein.
1. Create an "Open Topic" prompt using the style of one of the prompts from the last five years. See examples here. Also as a group write five multiple choice prompts based on a single passage using the five different question types, use this page to help you. Your multiple choice questions will be based on your class period and should be formatted like the example seen here submitted typed in 12 pt. Arial only, one group member will submit to Edmodo group:
P.1: Beginning 1/4 of the book
P.2: 2nd 1/4,
P.5 3rd 1/4
P.6 Ending
2.Final group presentation and reflection paper.
3. Turn in "Literature Circle" notes, "Major Works Data Sheet" and take the Open Topic/ M.C. test on your novel.
Disclaimer: This will all be scheduled in the coming weeks in the midst of personal statement work, wrapping up short stories and beginning Frankenstein.
Perrine's Sound and Sense Notes
Take notes (terms, definitions and how they function in fiction) on each section of literary devices from Perrine's Sound and Sense. Come to class the next day with your notes and having read and applied them to the text you read through careful close reading and annotation.
- "Plot/Structure notes"
- "Character notes"
- Point of View notes
"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been"
Annotation Directions:
When you read the story today see if you can locate fairytale like imagery Oates describes in the video. Using the tone word list write the tone word that best supports the imagery as you read. |
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Literature Clubs
You will choose one book to read and discuss with a small group (no more than 6). Read reviews on Amazon and Goodreads to choose your novel.
Below are the guidelines for "Literature Clubs" or Click here to download the entire packet. I will not be making copies of anything except the record keeping template at the very end. All the role sheets you can write on lined paper.
For the discussion board at, wilensky.collaborizeclassroom.com, post and reply- here are two well written A+++ student samples from last year. All written work should indicate "Meaning of the Work as a Whole" (MOWAW) using either the AXES (Assertion, Example, Explanation, Significance) format or the "Three C's" Concept, Context, Connection".
For full credit for Discussion Board Posts:
For the discussion board at, wilensky.collaborizeclassroom.com, post and reply- here are two well written A+++ student samples from last year. All written work should indicate "Meaning of the Work as a Whole" (MOWAW) using either the AXES (Assertion, Example, Explanation, Significance) format or the "Three C's" Concept, Context, Connection".
For full credit for Discussion Board Posts:
- Ask your group a question
- You need at least one quote and/or strong textual support
- Write to a peer audience but still in academic English
- Add something new to the discussion: add another quote or explain a quote in another group member’s post more fully.
- Post once a week and comment on two other students' posts (due Tuesday night for a Wednesday lit. circle). Reply at least twice before class Friday.
Book Choices
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. In the world of the near future, who will control women's bodies?
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable.
Offred can remember the days before, when she lived with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now....
Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable.
Offred can remember the days before, when she lived with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now....
Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.
The best-selling author of multiple award-winning books returns with his first novel in ten years, a powerful, fast and timely story of a troubled foster teenager — a boy who is not a “legal” Indian because he was never claimed by his father — who learns the true meaning of terror. About to commit a devastating act, the young man finds himself shot back through time on a shocking sojourn through moments of violence in American history. He resurfaces in the form of an FBI agent during the civil rights era, inhabits the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Big Horn, and then rides with an Indian tracker in the 19th Century before materializing as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. When finally, blessedly, our young warrior comes to rest again in his own contemporary body, he is mightily transformed by all he’s seen. This is Sherman Alexie at his most brilliant — making us laugh while breaking our hearts.
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.
A Lesson Before Dying, is set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shoot out in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and Jefferson's godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell and impart his learning and his pride to Jefferson before his death. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting—and defying—the expected.
Reading Short Stories
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
- Ernest Hemingway
- Ernest Hemingway
- What does a story need in order to be a story?
- What questions does this story leave you with?
- Do you think it’s harder to write a short short story like this one or a longer work, like a novel? Why?
"Raised by Women" Writing Assignment draft due in class Friday, Sept. 11
Write your own two stanza or more draft poem in the style of "Raised by Women". Use specific details and verbs that make your writing sing.