This site is brilliant really. Don’t let the plain background and lack of fanciful effects deceive you. The website is firstly FREE and offers ideas for teaching both Literature and English. The wordiness would have ordinarily put me off but it’s so well- classified (by level and topic no less), that it was easy to navigate the site. These are my be-sure-to-check-out pickings!
1) Click the Drama tab!
Simone Hennigan’s Drama for Secondary Schools is a good guide for beginning drama teachers. Hennigan suggests games, warm-up activities and sorts them out by level. She also suggests assessment modes for students of which I found the Drama Diary a good tool for the student to continually monitor his own progress in class.
2) Click the Shakespeare tab!
Sooner or later, we all have to teach Shakespeare and this is a good site not only because it covers popular plays like Hamlet, Othello and Romeo & Juliet but, also because it does close reading of important scenes by subject and theme, structure of the scene, characters, language as well as stagecraft.
3) Click the Selected Poems tab!
More than to read (and hear!) Andrew Moore’s poems, I liked this because teachers can model Moore to get students involved in appreciating poetry. Like Moore, students can write their own poems and record it. So because it’s less “foreign” and more personal, students may be more receptive to learning poetry.
Although the website looks boring, it is EXTREMELY well organized. I love the way they even list the colours with which they title their headings and sub-headings, so that you will be able to understand the content better!
ReplyDeleteApart from what Shiva has recommended, I also suggest that we take a look at the chapter by chapter questions because these can guide us to construct meaningful questions for the students. The questions are well structured because they generally move from a "What did you pick out from the chapter" type of question to "summarize the chapter" and to "what do you think" type of question. This is important because students need to be organized in the way they reflect in order to write a well-sequenced and organized essay. By training them to think sequentially, students will be able to apply this skill to when they organize for their essays.
Under the recommended Drama tab, I like the section on "Language and social contexts" best because it offers many ideas on how we can teach the way language is used in different contexts across many eras. I think this can be used as a stepping stone for us to teach our students to analyze the use of speech in different types of texts that they study and, to realize that there are various reasons for which playwrights choose to phrase the speeches differently.