After we finish Act III of Julius Caesar, I pose the following question to my students: The play is titled Julius Caesar, so what do you think about the fact that Caesar himself has been killed off, and yet the play still has two more acts left? Sometimes, we discuss it a bit before I […]
Education
Story Impressions for Julius Caesar
Earlier this month, I mentioned that I begin my unit on Julius Caesar with several pre-reading activities, due in part to the difficult nature of the text. Specifically, I shared a reading strategy called Phony Document and demonstrated how I use it along with excerpts from Plutarch’s biography of Julius Caesar before we begin the […]
Phony Document Reading Strategy with Julius Caesar
One of the reading strategies I really enjoy using is called Phony Document, which I’ve taken from the book Content Area Literacy: An Integrated Approach by Thomas W. Bean, John E. Readence, and R. Scott Baldwin. In a nutshell, the teacher creates a document that sounds highly credible and authentic, but it’s entirely made up. […]
Lord of the Flies Guided Imagery Activity
I promised a post on guided imagery for teaching Lord of the Flies, so voila! In simplest terms, guided imagery or guided visualization is a pre-reading or during reading strategy used to help students form a mental picture of what they will read or are reading so that they will better understand and remember it. […]
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I Still Haven’t Fallen Off the Face of the Earth
This is just to say that I still haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. But, in defense of my recent postlessness, I’ve been grading fall-on-my-sword amounts of literary analysis papers for the last week. Y’all, I’m a tad rusty after the world’s largest maternity leave. Nothing, nothing in the world of managing the […]
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Schoolmarm Shoes
I believe it’s time for a little reflection on the changes wrought by my return to teaching. I suppose I could write a helpful how-to post on successfully juggling multiple jobs, multiple small people, and one LCB with multiple issues. But that would make LCB laugh, long and hard, so we won’t go there. I […]