Length of Lesson: 50 minutes
Content Objectives:
Students will be able to analyze the changes of the narrator's voice in the story "Death Forgiven;" students will be able to create a graph or a pictogram reflecting those changes.
Language Objectives:
Students will be able to define meanings of vocabulary words; students will be able to construct a written response to a CMT-type question.
Materials Needed:
copies of the chapter "Death Forgiven" from the book
The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child
by Francisco Jimenez; blackboard or chart paper; students' workbooks.
Vocabulary Taught:
to smuggle, undocumented, dilapidated, to perch on (something), attachment, shrieking, wailing, to dart out.
Sequencing of Activities
Initiation: (5 minutes) I will ask students if any of them or their relatives or friends has ever experienced a death of a pet. What kinds of feelings have they had? How have they overcome the sad event? What have they understood from it? What kinds of conclusions have they made? This discussion will lead us to reading the chapter about the tragic ending of the main character's parrot.
Development:
(40 minutes) 1). I will introduce and define the vocabulary words that students will find in the story supplying numerous examples of their use in sentences. 2). Students will have a shared reading situation: I will read the chapter out loud applying a dramatic expression, while students will follow me using their copies of the story. I will stop at places when there is a need to clarify a vocabulary word or check for students' comprehension. This reading piece has to be particularly explicit, because it prepares the success of the whole lesson. As I pointed out earlier in this unit, I will highlight beforehand the words and phrases, which pertain to the narrator's voice. 3). To continue scaffolding of the reading, I will lead students through creating a pictogram or a graph on chart paper that will reflect the changes of the narrator's voice (the narrator is also the main character). First, his voice expresses affection and attachment to the family's parrot
El Perico
as the parrot just began living with them. Then, it becomes worried when at times he was missing his best companion, the neighbors' cat Catarina. Finally, the voice possesses absolute grief and stress when one day the father, highly irritated by the parrot's loud shrieking, put a tragic end to
El Perico
's life. The graph showing these transformations will eventually drop to the bottom on the scale of feelings. However, at the end of this story the narrator prays for
El Perico
and for his father, which brings out the feelings of forgiveness, understanding, and love. Accordingly, our graph will rise up, and we will finish it almost at the same high point or even higher on the scale of feelings as we have begun it. 4). Students will begin working on the written response to the CMT-type question (strand D2): "Write a paragraph that could have appeared in the journal of a person who experienced death of a pet. Use information from the story to support your answer." While explaining the written assignment, I will stress the fact that our voice constantly changes with the change of circumstances, as we have just figured out from drawing the graph. So, I expect their writing to show this important concept. (The writing of the response may require more time than this lesson has for it, so it should be continued in the next lesson.)
Closure:
(5 minutes) Students will share their written responses with their partners.
Methods of Assessment:
informal - monitoring comprehension, peer evaluation of written responses, teacher's written feedback on students' written responses; formal - assessment of written responses on the CMT assessment scale: 0, 1, or 2.
