Getting things started

I teach two sections of English Enrichment, grades 6-8, at the Northwest Chinese School. (nwchinese.org). This is a great independent enrichment school that offers kids the opportunity to learn Mandarin (both speaking and writing) as well as pursuing other extracurriculars, from math and writing enrichment classes to Chinese culture courses, SAT prep and traditional music.


I'm beginning this blog just a few days before my first weekend class (a week ahead of the other one) begins their National Novel Writing Month. Because of the difficulties of school-scheduled midterms and Thanksgiving break, I'm shifting our calendar forward a bit from the official month of November. It takes something away from the excitement of it to not begin with a new month, but I think the importance of having a class-wide kickoff and a class-wide ending are worth the sacrifice of a calendar page.


My plan for this blog is pretty straightforward: I want to exercise my own mind as a teacher and a student, remaining constantly reflective about what I'm teaching, how I'm teaching, and why. Since it's only a few times a week that I get a chance to truly teach, I need to keep my skills sharp and my analysis of those skills accurate.


I also want to post my own lesson plans and a brief take on how they worked out. I've been both helped and disappointed by what's available in the way of inspiration, instruction and even grammar worksheets on the Internet, especially for free. If you're a teacher and you see something you like, please – take, use, and tell me how it worked with your students!


On the sidebar you'll see a list of the resources I use most commonly. Some of them I highly recommend having your students buy, if you've got the resources, or keeping on the reference shelf if you're lucky enough to have your own classroom. Others, like “Playwriting” and “Fantasy & Science Fiction,” are just useful as comprehensible, user-friendly manuals on elements of fiction and creative writing.




Of all the stuff I've taught on NaNoWriMo, this is the lesson plan that's worked the best, and it also happens to be the one I taught last week. So check it out, and feel free to take it!









Set-Up:
I've got some good perspective on this unit and this plan, as I taught it last year as well. At this point in the unit, my students know they have a massive novel project beginning next week. We've already done world-building and setting creation in the class, and spent some time on character development and internal and external conflict as well. If you're lucky, there's excitement in the air and students are chatting with each other about their novels and characters. (This is usually the point when I've been reading so many of their prewriting works that I'm having trouble keeping their characters out of my own fiction!) Now it's time to zero in on plot, the most anxiety-inducing part of the whole novel (at least until we get to actually putting words on paper, after which brainstorming of any sort will seem like a vacation).


Two weeks before this point, I assigned students to choose any novel they wished to read. I put no upper or lower limits on length, level, etc, but I did urge them to choose something that fit the genre they expected to be writing in. I do this two weeks before because I only see my students once a week and have no classroom library to offer them; if you've got a well-stocked English classroom and a class that meets every day, you can assign this as little as three or four days before you plan to teach this lesson. If students panic slightly over being expected to read a whole novel in three days, remind them that they're going to WRITE a whole novel in only 30...and that the goal here is to read it for fun and inspiration, not intense, academic attention. There wasn't time this past weekend, but last year when I had a smaller class I built some time into the beginning of class for general discussion of what they're reading – sharing titles, protagonists and general opinions.






The vocabulary, examples, and Roller Coaster outline for teaching plot are all straight from the Young Writers' Program's absolutely fabulous NaNoWriMo workbook for Middle Schoolers (p. 22-31






The “Bingo” cards and general structure of the game, as well as the connection to what they're reading, is all mine.










NWCS Week 5


Instructional Goals
SWBAT
1. Recognize the elements of plot and apply them to novel.
2. Recognize internal and external conflict.
3. Begin planning their own novel.


Essential Content:


Protagonist: The main character of your novel, the one whose goals and efforts make up the story. Example: Jack from "Jack and the Beanstalk."
Antagonist: The character who stands between your protagonist and his/her goal. Example: the opposing sports team, another love interest for the girl or boy your protagonist likes, the evil witch or wizard
Supporting Character: A character who helps the protagonist achieve his/her goals. Example: A best friend, a parent, the mysterious old man who gives advice.
External conflict: The conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist, or between the protagonist and external forces. The sports game, the dance competition, the wicked witch's attempts to rule the world
Internal conflict: The fears and insecurities the protaognist has to overcome in order to get what he or she wants. Does he or she need more self-confidence? More knowledge? To defeat a crippling fear of kittens?




Plot Elements




Set-up: Introduces the protagonist, the setting, and the conflict.
Inciting incident: The moment that launches the protagonist into the adventure -- ready or not!
Rising action: The longest section of the novel, when the story gradually unfolds from the inciting incident to the
Climax: The turning point of the story, the "gasp" moment.
Falling action: The action after the climax: the success or failure of the protagonist, the defeat or success of the antagonist, the resolution of the main conflict.
Resolution: How things work out in the end, how your characters and the world around them have been changed.
Order of Instruction:
Pre-Instructional: (10 minutes)
This is a good time to connect to any vocabulary or grammar work you generally have going on; in my case, we shared interesting adjectives from a thesaurus-use exercise of the previous week. The goal is to start the class off cheerfully (and perhaps a trifle competitively.). You can also skip right to the summarizing exercise below. Especially if your class is used to coming in to find a journalling or other assignment already on the board, begin with that.


Pep talk to them. Okay. Final day approaches. You know your setting. You know your characters. Now for that itsy bitsy detail: the plot.


The good news: You already know all the plots there are. You're just going to put them together in a new way.


Start by summarizing. Take five minutes and summarize the plot of the book you're reading in three sentences.


Template: Sentence One: Where is the protagonist at the story's beginning, and what starts him off?
Sentence Two: What protagonist does to change himself or the world around him.
Sentence three: What happens, to protagonist and the world, at the end of the story? (10 minutes)




Instructional: (10 minutes)


Read out some of the summaries, if there's interest. (Especially if many of the books came from the school or classroom library, you might want to suggest that students write down the title and author of anything that interests them when they hear it summarized, but don't make this an assignment; it's just a good opportunity to foster a reading community.)


Define plot terms on the board and hand out the “Stuff You Should Know” sheet. I use a transparency or blow-up of the Roller Coaster Plot Outline as a useful visual to think about the arc of the plot.


Provide detail to the definitions by class discussion and list examples from books kids are reading and/or popular media. (I have a horrible tendency to connect absolutely everything to Harry Potter, Star Wars, or The Lord of the Rings. My students, bless them, roll with this.) This can be straight lecture if the discussion is like pulling teeth, but the more you can get students to supply you with examples and definitions, the better.


Post-Instructional: Plot Elements Bingo. (15 to 20 minutes)
Hand out the Plot Elements bingo sheets below, as well as something to use for markers.
Explain that this is a way to share and discuss how plot's been done in the books they're reading. In some ways, it's a classic bingo game – you choose elements at random and call them out, and when students have a straight row across, down or diagonally, they call out Bingo and get a chance to earn whatever prize makes sense in your classroom (I do everything from pencils to candy to extra credit cards. It's almost NaNoWriMo, after all; your classroom should be about to explode with little incentives and positive reinforcement and general novelling love.)


When a student calls out that he or she has Bingo, ask them to stand up and,, speaking clearly enough to be heard throughout the room, briefly describe the elements in the novel they read. For example:
“In “The White Mountains,” Will, the protagonist, wants to reach the White Mountains where the resistance to the Tripod aliens is quartered. (Free space: What does the protagonist want?). He meets one girl who he is attracted to until he finds out she has already been Capped and will be taken away by the Tripods when she is crowned queen of the Tournament. (Supporting Character: Love Interest). The climax of the story comes when Will manages to blow up a tripod that is trying to capture him. (Climax). The inciting incident in the story is when he meets the pretend Vagrant who tells him how to get to the White Mountains (Inciting Incident.)”


I try to be flexible but not a pushover when it comes to definitions; Voldemort, for example, cannot really be defined as an antagonist who's “just in the protagonist's way,” the way a romantic rival might be, and Gandalf is a mentor supporting character much more than a sidekick (or a love interest. Um.). Of course, if a student is inspired to make a compelling case, that just means they've really grasped the term and can apply it to their reading.


Homework: (5 minutes)
I hand out a list of the PreWriting Exercises and ask students to choose any two to do. This is a timing thing; you can do more, or less, or you can hand this out much earlier in the unit and say that students must have done X many by the end. I usually remind students that they want to know their setting, their characters, and their plot before they start writing, and to choose their prewriting exercises accordingly. If you want a more plot-specific homework assignment, the Roller Coaster Plot Outline is a good simple one. Many of the exercises can also be specifically adjusted for plot, or character, or setting.


Materials:
Prewriting Exercises Homework Sheet
Bingo Sheets
Stuff You Should Know Handout

Your Resources:
Young Writers' Program Middle School Workbook 2009, p. 22-31




Assessment:
I taught this class last year, and again this year, and will teach it a third time this coming weekend. It's always been fun and I'm usually impressed with how fast the students get the terms and apply them to their reading. We'll usually play another version of this before the midterm to review the vocabulary, though then (if I'm feeling evil!) I'll ask students to give examples from the novels THEY wrote.
Positives:
It's a fun class session that usually sparks up a lot of enthusiasm and takes some of the terror off of this whole “PLOTPLOTPLOT!” thing.
It also gets at one of the key reasons to do NaNoWriMo even if nobody in your class plans on being a writer some day: when you write a novel, you get better at paying attention to what goes INTO a novel. You can look behind the seams and appreciate what makes a story work. Last year, I referred back to this class alot when I wanted to start introducing ideas of theme, subject, and general literary analysis for a thesis-paper project.
Pitfalls:
It's easy to spend way too much time in lecture. Put the definitions in front of the students, share them briefly, and let the examples flesh out the details. If you're hoarse at the end of class, you're talking way too much. During Bingo, resist the temptation to be either overly lenient or overly demanding with kids whose reading material you know well (No, no, I think the climax in The Tale of Desperaux is...); instead, sit back and enjoy the possibility of learning about a few new books to add to your library.
Like any class with lots of student talking and enthusiasm, things can get out of hand. Know your class and plan accordingly. For a very large or very distractible class, an alternative to Bingo is to cut the sheets into cards and have students play “Go Fish” with each other (“Do you have any supporting characters who are mentors?” “Yes, in The Warriors...” or “Nope, go fish!”)
Also like any class that relies mostly on student volunteers, don't let three or four really enthusiastic kids distract you from checking in with everybody. I try to at least walk around while calling out the Bingo and make sure that everyone seems to be watching their board and placing pieces thoughtfully.