Student Teaching: Featured Lesson Plans and Activities

An Unpopular Opinion: I love lesson planning! Here are some of my favorites:

Edgar Allan Poe Choose Your Own Adventure Game

Technology in the Classroom

As today's students are constantly being exposed to the latest and greatest advancements, the need to teach technological literacy is ever increasing. Below are several lessons and activities in which I have incorporated the use of online programs and resources to provide students with unconventional opportunities to engage with a text.

Choose Your Own Adventure with Edgar Allan Poe

In this activity, students assume the role of the crazed narrator in one of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous tales, "The Cask of Amontillado." I used an online program, Storyboard, to create a "choose your own adventure" styled narrative game that simultaneously checks for reading comprehension - or completion - and gives the students the opportunity to dive into the psychology of an unreliable narrator. By having students make choices as the narrator, they are required to think critically - What would Montresor do? - about motives and the author's intention. In addition, the game structure gives students context - it helps them decode the complicated text and provides relevancy and relatability to the characters.

Click here to play the game yourself.

This activity could easily be extended into a lesson on plot structure or narrative writing and could be presented to the students as book report option. The Storyboard software is very user friendly which allows for easy customization for any topic.

WebQuest: Genocide Violence in the Modern World

This WebQuest activity is a week-long unit that addresses the somewhat overlooked problem of genocide in the modern world. The tasks require students to conduct research, read texts, and write responses to rigorous reflective prompts. The unit includes both group and individual assignments. The WebQuest structure provides students with a great deal of autonomy while also allowing the teacher to control the resource materials to ensure quality of research. The activities and tasks are self-guided and all materials are provided through various links on the WebQuest site.

Click here to view the WebQuest site.

Theatre Arts Emphasis

Though I have a degree in English, I have never loved writing. I can never seem to find the exact words that will tell my stories. Instead, I use visuals. Theatre was my first passion and, over the years, it has become the perfect outlet for my creative pursuits. Below are some of my favorite lessons I have created for the Theatre classroom.

Intermediate Acting

This lesson plan was written as part of my senior thesis. I created a set of curricula for three high school Theatre classes: Intermediate Acting, Advanced Acting, and Technical Theatre. I used the 2019-2020 school calendar for Metro Nashville and set my classes in a block schedule.

This lesson is part of a unit entitled "The Art of Acting" and focusses on a close reading of two monologues in diverse formats. Students are comparing and discussing Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" monologue and a more modern soliloquy from Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton.

Click here to access the lesson plan.

Intermediate Acting: "The World Was Wide Enough" YouTube Video

Technical Theatre

This lesson plan was also created as part of my senior thesis and is part of the Technical Theatre curriculum.

Elements of Design Application Worksheet

This is an introductory lesson to a unit entitled "Elements of Design" in which students learn about the production design process. With a mixture of lecture and application, the students learn key vocabulary and have an opportunity to learn through hands-on experience.

Click here to access the lesson plan and its materials.

Youth Theatre

This lesson plan was designed for a day camp with a local children's theater. The lesson is really an outline of the entire day starting at 8:45 and going until 3:00 where a group of 5-7 year olds and I explored the worlds from Mary Pope Osborne's famous book series, The Magic Tree House. When offered this particular teaching position, I was asked to create three days worth of lessons based on the books; all the other details were completely up to me. This lesson is the last day of the workshop.

As for context, the kids and I had been completing a series of quests set for us by the book's hero and heroine, Jack and Annie. Jack and Annie had been communicating with us through a series of letters and left us a handy-dandy Explorer's Guidebook that provided us with any necessary information about the location to which we would travel. As a group, we had been working towards earning our Master Librarian Cards, the highest honor an Explorer may receive. So far, we had travelled to Elizabethan England and met Shakespeare, Ancient Japan to fly with a dragon, Ancient Greece to confer with Plato at the Olympics, and had sailed on a grand pirate ship to search for lost treasure.

Click here to access the lesson plan and its materials to continue the adventure!

English Language Arts Emphasis

When I was a kid, my dad made a deal with me where he would buy me any book as long as I read it cover to cover. Little did he know just how much money that would cost him one day in the form of an English degree. I have always loved reading and how it gives you an opportunity to explore fantastic worlds. As an educator, I want to instill this love of reading and discovery in my students.

Persons and Poetry: A Close Reading of "We Real Cool" and "At Harvesttime" with The Other Wes Moore

I have always struggled with poetry - writing it, reading it - despite my fascination with imagery, symbolism, and plays on words. So I was very surprised at how excited I was to teach this lesson during my fall student teaching placement.

In this lesson, the students do a close reading of "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks and "At Harvesttime" by Maya Angelou. Afterwards, they take what they have learned from the poems and apply the meaning to the lives of the characters in The Other Wes Moore, a(n) biography/autobiography about two men with the same name who grow up to lead drastically different lives.

Click here to see the lesson plan and materials.

Essay Writing

This lesson plan was written in response to a need for more practice based on students' formal writing assignments; the students needed a refresher on the writing components I would be assessing on their upcoming essay. The following lesson plan is the refresher leading up to the students' midterm essay writing assignment.

Click here to see the lesson plan and materials.

Middle School English Language Arts

Though my preference lies in the high school age group, I have found in my eighth grade placements to really enjoy the curiosity and creativity that middle schoolers can bring to the table. One of my favorite memories with my eighth graders is of teaching rhetorical devices with different famous speeches. In the following lesson, the class looks at the rhetorical devices found in one of the most memorable speeches in history, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream."

Click here to see the lesson plan.