Edward D. Cohen
To be used in Weeks Four and Five
Objectives
-
1. To Read Aloud
Raisin In The Sun
.
-
2. To Increase Students’ Reading and Listening Skills.
-
3. To Help Students Interpret the Dramatic Genre.
-
4. To Help Students Increase Their Creative and Aesthetic Development.
Explanation
We will use
Raisin In The Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry as one of our major studies of a full length play. This mini-unit will cover three weeks. The class will read the play in the following manner: They will be broken up into small groups for the purpose of studying different actions of the play. They will be brought together for the reading of the play and for group discussions on how they approached their tasks. The class will read certain parts of the play as a large group exercise. Auditions will be held for specific roles, to give the class a feeling of “trying out,” as it is done on the professional stage. Individual members of the class will be assigned specific passages to study and read to the class. The teacher will read alone and ask the class for their interpretations of the readings. Each class member will be asked to commit to memory certain passages from the play. They will deliver these lines as they act out the scenes containing these speeches.
Text:
Raisin In The Sun
, by Lorraine Hansberry .
Week One: We will begin the mini-unit by reading Lorraine Hansberry’s letter to her mother before the show opened in New Haven. The letter will show the students what Ms. Hansberry wanted to accomplish by writing the play. It is found in
Black Scenes
, by Alice Childress. We will introduce the characters and the setting of the play. We will contrast the setting with the homes of the students, and they will write this out as a homework assignment. We will meet the Younger family and try to draw some conclusions about them before we really get to know them. We will save these written papers and reread them at the conclusion of the play. We will audition for roles and read the first scene aloud. We will continue to read aloud in the manner described above. We will also be doing our warm-up exercises as we read the play.
Homework
-
1. Write out character sketches of the Younger family.
-
2. Answer five study guide questions from Scene One.
-
3. Pick out five new words from the play and give definitions.
-
4. Write out what the Langston Hughes poem means to you and tell how it fits into the play.