Katharine M. Liphardt
Students will be able to reflect upon a written work and compare/contrast specific aspects of that piece in an analytical way. Through this unit students will recognize the importance of character and traits we ascribe to a character due to the events and experiences that character undergoes.
This six week unit is on Character Analysis: Understanding of Character Through the Elements of Literature. This unit is intended to help launch genre -based peer supported learning groups in September/October. At this point in the school year, students will need the organized scaffolding of the teacher to prepare them to be able to work in cooperative learning groups for the remainder of the year. These cooperative learning groups are an essential component of New Haven's Reading Curriculum. They will also benefit the students across the curriculum as well as through multiple genres of reading and writing. The skills and strategies introduced through this unit will allow the students to hone their critical reading skills and the unit will serve as the foundation for the remainder of their reading instruction. Meeting the objectives of this unit will enable the students to work successfully in peer groups run by themselves.
The four weeks of lessons will be centered around our whole group, "core novel", No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman. This book comes from the City of New Haven's Reading program called "Plugged -In". This program refers to a "core novel" , which is a book read to the whole class by the teacher. The students learn strategies in these whole group sessions and then apply them while in their cooperative learning groups. The fifth and sixth weeks of the unit will be the culmination of the book and students will be drafting, editing, revising, and publishing their written analyses. The goals and objectives for this unit can be met by using any fiction text that the teacher deems appropriate. I have chosen to use the novel No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman both because of its content and because of its formal features.
The book No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman, is so typical of the language, ideas, and actions of middle school students. There are a lot of underlying issues or themes in this text that are relevant to the lives of middle school students. This book is about a middle school football star named Wallace Wallace who, for personal reasons, has chosen to never tell a lie. He chooses to always be honest, brutally honest at times, and this causes him to get into some difficulty. His often harsh honesty has earned him a reputation that is hard to get rid of. Wallace, the athlete, is forced to spend time with the drama club while he is serving multiple detentions. Wallace goes into this punishment with preconceived notions about "drama kids", but as he gets to know them and understands his "real friends", Wallace realizes he may have been wrong. This book approaches issues of honesty, bullying, popularity, stereotyping, and relationships. My students get to experience these issues through the characters in the story. Because these issues are so relevant to the students, this book offers many opportunities for the teacher to either reinforce strategies or to introduce new skills and strategies with relevant teachable moments. It is easy to introduce a skill or a strategy to the students when it is coupled with real life understanding.
I find that the experiences the characters in the book go through are typical of all middle school aged children. No More Dead Dogs opens with a struggle between complete honesty -vs.- lying to protect people's feelings. The students relate very well to this and discussion is rich and helps to set the purpose for reading. When these issues arise in the story I take advantage of that by pointing out to my students similar situations that they may have been involved in. For example, when my students form opinions about teachers based on what they have heard, I point out how Wallace does the same to the drama club, thus making connections. Other topics that arise and are relevant to all children are the importance of popularity and the stereotyping that goes along with that. Obviously children at this age are directly affected by these issues and are able to analyze the effects of them. The book includes characters that are involved in various school related activities that all students can relate to. As we get to know the characters throughout the story, my students are better able to make more accurate predictions, connections, and inferences in regard to the characters and events. We get plenty of practice strengthening the skills and strategies that tie directly to this novel and my unit.
The structure of the book itself also provides opportunities to expand upon. The book is organized by multiple points of view. Each chapter is written from a particular perspective. The students quickly gravitate towards a "favorite" character based on the events and experiences of that character. The story also has an element of suspense to it, so as the students get to know each character, they naturally form predictions in regard to the ongoing mystery. When the students make these predictions and identify characters that they like and dislike, it is all being done based on inference. I point out to them that they are forming opinions based on events that the characters were directly involved in, just as I would be able to "infer" that a student does not care about his/her grades because they do not do their work. I am taking events that I have observed and I am forming an opinion about that person due to his or her actions. Inferring and connecting are very difficult strategies for my students to implement. The events in this book, combined with real life experiences, provide a natural scaffold that allows my students to strengthen skills in regard to these strategies.
In addition to being written from multiple perspectives, No More Dead Dogs is a multi genre text. Within the book there are examples of letter writing, newspaper articles, journal entries, and use of play dialogue. The use of the newspaper articles in this story allows me to introduce the idea of media influence and the effects it has on our opinions of people and events. Each of these writing styles, along with the term "multi genre", allows for either introductory or review lessons. For the purposes of my unit, I use these feature to teach my students about author's craft and purpose. We, as a class, notice how and when the author implements these into the text and we analyze why the author would choose to do so. This really helps the students to become more critical readers. My students do not often consider why an author organizes a book a certain way or why he/she uses certain words. This book very easily helps them to begin to do that.
Another important aspect of teaching author's craft is Korman's use of humor in No More Dead Dogs. Teaching students to identify the tone of a book is difficult. This book includes a lot of idioms, hyperbole, satire, sarcasm, and figurative language. This style of writing is often laborious for my students because they are very literal. We often have to stop and decipher the meaning of some of these figurative phrases. Doing this helps my students to broaden their vocabulary, as well as identify the humorous tone of this story. One character in particular uses idioms inaccurately and these are referred to as "Rickisms". The students have a lot of fun with these and also get to learn the actual idiom and its meaning. Through teaching these I realized that this style of writing and often our use of language is not cross cultural. Many of my students had never heard of these phrases, though they are so familiar to me. These quickly became ongoing teachable moments and we would log them in our journals as we came across them in the text. It also allowed the students to practice using context clues and what they know about the character and events to determine the meaning of the figurative language on their own. The word choice, use of figurative language, and the multi genre/multi perspective organization of the text really allows the students to deeply understand the concepts of author's craft/purpose. This awareness is transferred over to other texts and further strengthens their overall reading experience.