Literature Lesson Plans

Simple warm-up and discussion based activities (verbal)

Close Reading Activity

• Students define in their own words what they think ‘close reading’ or ‘quote analysis’ is. If they’re not sure, prompt them to think about what they did in high school when they read a novel or a short story.
• Come up with possible paper topics based on lecture and notes. Write down these topics/questions and keep them in mind.
• Make photocopies of a chapter in the novel, or have students write in their own books. In partners (you can divvy up 4-5 pages of the chapter for each group) students will go through the chapter looking for the things they discussed earlier.
• While reading, students may also want to mark passages to include in their paper later.
• To get discussion going, ask students how what they have underlined or highlighted relates to the themes they discussed.

Discussion activity

• Each student writes a discussion question.
  • A good discussion question will use one or both of the critical frameworks we’ve talked about so far (Feminist studies, Indigenous studies, Postcolonial studies) and a concept or instance from the novel you’re currently studying
• Collect the questions
• Put students in groups of three and hand out three questions that no one in the group wrote
• Have students pick the best/favorite questions and discuss it
• Nominate one person to record discussion and relevant passages/page numbers, one to present the question to the class and one to “facilitate” discussion and present what their group found.
• Wrap-up with a whip share

Students came up with really good questions. This works best when the facilitator in each group plays devil’s advocate. It really pushes them to dig deeper into the question



Interactive and project-based activities (hands on)

• Have students generate a list of the most important characters in the novel
• Divide and conquer: Have students in groups/partners fill out a sheet for each character- add or rearrange sheet as necessary for the novel
• Have students tape the sheets to the white board with connected/related characters near each other. Pass a dry erase marker around the room, so that each student will draw a line between two characters and write the relationship on the connecting line. Go around the room until you think every relationship has been covered.  Students should add a page number where they found a description or example of the character’s relationship.
• Meanwhile students are making a copy of the web in Inspiration to email out to everyone or let students copy it by hand
• By the end, students should understand
  • What is each character’s role in the story? What do they represent?
  • How does each character resist stereotypes? Do they fall into any tropes?
  • What is the significance of their relationships with other characters?
  • How do these relationships complicate the story/plot?

Character: _______________________________________

Related to: Relationship:

_____________________ _____________________

_____________________ _____________________

_____________________ _____________________

_____________________ _____________________

_____________________ _____________________

Traits:

Important actions in the story:

Important Quotes:

Character study guide example 1
Character study guide example 2