The students compare the text version of Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun to two different movie versions. The students document the interpretations of the text presented in the movies in Venn Diagrams, write short reflections, and complete a final project.
Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun provides a compelling and honest look into one family's aspirations to move to another Chicago neighborhood and the thunderous crash of a reality that raises questions about for whom the "American Dream" is accessible.
Ramona and Beezus, two sisters, get into trouble for not eating their dinner. As punishment, they must cook dinner for the family.The girls learn how difficult it is to prepare a family dinner.
This lesson integrates coding and computer science into English Language Arts for the purpose of fostering appreciation of Shakespearean wit and language and to provide students exposure to coding. Students first choose words that carry insulting connotations from a Shakespearean play and then create a program that randomly generates insults based upon those found words. Swift Playgrounds, Scratch, or Raspberry Pi are recommended resources for creating this project, and links to projects are provided for each of these platforms. Sample code and directions are provided. Students who are beginning to learn coding may complete the code while more advanced individuals may modify the program or create their own.
This lesson integrates coding and computer science into English Language Arts for the purpose of fostering appreciation of Shakespearean wit and language and to provide students exposure to coding. Students first choose words that carry insulting connotations from a Shakespearean play and then create a program that randomly generates insults based upon those found words. Swift Playgrounds, Scratch, or Raspberry Pi are recommended resources for creating this project, and links to projects are provided for each of these platforms. Sample code and directions are provided. Students who are beginning to learn coding may complete the code while more advanced individuals may modify the program or create their own.
Infographic developed as a sample student assignment for the Designing with OER fellowship from the Open Ed Group.
This collection uses primary sources to explore Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.
(Re)Writing Communities and Identities enables college-level students to develop their ability to compose various informative and expressive genres, including analyses, reflections, summaries, syntheses, and informative reports. While students raise their consciousness about their writing process and audience-based informative strategies, they also familiarize themselves with important social and cultural issues related to the theme of "identities and communities."
This blog is for children, parents, and anyone else interested in Arabic children's books. There is information about children's literature awards, summer reading suggestions for kids, reviews of children's books, and more. The blog's author also posts news about children's literature, such as when big websites are having sales and when new websites for children are launched.
In which John Green teaches you about Charlotte Brontë's classic coming of age novel, Jane Eyre. Look, we don't like to make judgment values here, but Jane Eyre is awesome. By which we mean the book is great, and the character is amazing. When Jane Eyre was published in 1847, it was a huge hit. It really hit the controversial balance beautifully, being edgy enough to make news, but still mainstream enough to be widely popular. It was sort of like the Fight Club of its day, but not quite as testosterone-fueled. You'll learn a little about the story, learn about Jane as a feminist heroine, and even get some critical analysis on how Bertha might just be a dark mirror that acts out Jane's emotional reactions.
Because ESL Level 1 students may not all be at the same level, some of the readings may be too difficult for some students. However, the emphasis in these activities is to work on reading strategies for all levels of reading, both at the students' level and above it as well.This module can be combined with the others uploaded about grammar, teaching sentence structure, and writing activities to create an entire OER based ESL class for this level.
In this course students will visit the past through cookbooks to learn about what foodstuffs and technologies were available and when, and how religious and nutritional concerns dictated what was eaten and how it was cooked. Students will also learn about the gender dynamics of culinary writing and performances and the roles people played in writing and cooking recipes.
An advanced Spanish reading course centering around environmental issues.
This course introduces prose narrative, both short stories and the novel. It examines the construction of narrative and the analysis of literary response.
Reading Fiction is designed to sharpen your skills as a critical reader. As we explore both short stories and novels focusing on the theme of “the city in literature,” we will learn about the various elements that shape the way we read texts - structure, narrative voice, character development, novelistic experimentation, historical and political contexts and reader response.
This course explores the form, content, and historical context of various works of fiction specifically through the thematic lens of “dysfunctional families.” We will focus primarily on questions pertaining to the structure, language, story, and characters of these fictional works.
Great works of fiction often take us to far-off places; they sometimes conduct us on journeys toward a deeper understanding of what’s right next door. We’ll read, discuss, and interpret a range of short and short-ish works: The reading list will be chosen from among such texts as “Gilgamesh,” Homer’s Odyssey (excerpts), Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (excerpts), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Saleh’s Season of Migration to the North, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” Toni Morrison’s Jazz, H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Beckett’s How It Is, Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Forster’s A Passage to India. As a CI-H class, this subject will involve substantial practice in argumentative writing and oral communication.
How do you read a poem? Intuition is not the only answer. In this class, we will investigate some of the formal tools poets use—meter, sound, syntax, word-choice, and other properties of language—as well as exploring a range of approaches to reading poetry, from the old (memorization and reading out loud) to the new (digitally enabled visualization and annotation). We will use readings available online via the generosity of the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets. We will also think collectively about how to approach difficult poems.
“Reading Poetry” has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions – as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture.
The central concern of this class is the historical relationship between the social lives of everyday people and U.S. American poetics, with a special emphasis on what June Jordan once termed the “difficult miracle of Black poetry in America.” How does poetry help us to know one another? And how might we better understand the particular role of poetry, of poiesis, for those historically barred from the very practice of reading or writing, from ownership (even of one’s own body), and various generally recognized forms of belonging? For this course, these will be some of our animating questions.