UNIVERSITY NEIGHBORHOOD HIGH SCHOOL

 TECHNOLOGY LESSON PLAN

Linda Wang

Name of  Lesson/Unit: Friendship

 In this unit students will explore the meaning of friendship by seeking answers to the following questions in the reading: Do friends need to be alike, or can they be very different? Does it take time for a friendship to grow, or can it happen quickly?  Students will read the play “Driving Miss Daisy” by Alfred Uhry and a real life story, “A Brave Man lays His Life on the Line” by Joe Treen and S. Avery Brown, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Fox” from The Little Prince and Paul Simon’s song, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

  Grade level: ninth grade (L3D, L4D)

 Core Subject Standards:

Students will read various texts in this unit, write an essays with a controlling idea that conveys the theme of  two texts in the unit or articles on the internet.  Students will do peer editing.

 Core Subject Instructional Objectives:

 Students will verbalize what they know about a topic by looking at the title of a text.  Students will improve pronunciation.  Students will understand and utilize new vocabulary.   Students will retell the story and act out the play, “Driving Miss Daisy.”

 Technology Content Standards:

Students use technology to locate, evaluate, and collect information from a variety of sources.  Students use technology tools to process data and report results.

  Materials:

·         Voice in Literature by Mary Lou Mccloskey and Lydia Stack. Third unit: Friendship, pages 85 – 121.

·         Computers with Internet access.

 Computer Applications:

Students will use Microsoft Word and Internet to complete their projects.

 Resources (URLS, hyperlinks):

·         Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s life story:
 http://members.tripod.lycos.nl/tlp/antoine.htm

·         Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince:
 http://elpa.post.ru/win/MP/EN/I.html

·         Paul Simon’s biography site:
 http://wbr.com/paulsimon/capeman/cmp/biography.html   

Activities and Strategies:

Students will read Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Fox” from  The Little Prince and Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy.   Students will guess and explain new vocabulary in texts; the teacher, as a facilitator, helps guide students to understand new vocabulary.  The class goes over the three texts mentioned above together thinking loud.  Then students paraphrase.  Students answer written and oral comprehension questions.

Writing activities: 
 1. Definition of a controlling idea: a controlling idea is the theme in an essay that conveys the main ideas shared by any two works of literature.

2. After understanding the concept of a controlling idea, students may choose any two pieces of writing, one from the textbook and one from the Internet site, The Little Prince, provided above.

3. Students produce an essay with one controlling idea supported by two of the above works.

Listening activity:

Play the song by Paul Simon.  Students will draw what they feel about the song.  Secondly students will complete a cloze exercise.

ASSESSMENT/RUBRIC

 EXCELLENT:

Content: The essay has a clear thesis that conveys the main idea of both literature writings. The writer develops the thesis in the body paragraphs and emphasizes the thesis in conclusion paragraph.  The entire essay is logical and coherent.

Development: Each body paragraph begins with a topic sentence supported by evidence in texts or materials from web sites.  These evidences should support his/her thesis using direct or indirect quotes.

Conventions: The writer observes English conventions such as correct spelling, punctuation, using correct tenses, idioms, etc.

GOOD:

Content: The writer may state the thesis of the essay, but he or she doesn’t develop thesis fully in body paragraphs.  Or, the writer doesn’t state the thesis correctly since the thesis must convey the main idea of both writing.  The thesis may be mentioned in the conclusion.  The essay is logical and coherent. 

Development: The writer has a topic sentence at the beginning of each body paragraph, but he or she doesn’t use detailed evidence to sufficiently support the topic sentence.  Or the writer only uses evidence from one essay.

Conventions: The writer occasionally makes minor grammatical, idiomatic, or punctuation mistakes, but on the whole, no mistakes are serious enough to interfere with the flow of the essay.

FAIR:

Content: The essay has a clear thesis, but the writer doesn’t develop it in body paragraphs or uses unrelated evidence. The essay may have logical flaws; the transition between paragraphs may not be coherent.

Development: The writer doesn’t provide a topic sentence, and the evidences are not coherent or related to the thesis.  The transition between paragraphs is not smooth.  There is an absence of transition words between paragraphs.

Conventions: The writing may have tense errors, flows in syntax, sentence structures, and idiomatic usage.  There may also be spelling mistakes, too.

POOR:

Content: There is no clear thesis statement in the essay. The writer writes incoherently. The writer doesn’t seem to understand the organization of an essay.

Development: The writer may provide supporting details from texts or web sites materials, but they are not logically or coherently related to a thesis.