The focus of this unit is to teach my students how to analyze fictional and non-fictional texts before writing a creative text. I want my students to apply their artistic talents as a vehicle to understand difficult literary passages and make sense of complex and ambiguous narrators or characters. Every lesson plan has specific objectives to have a clear idea of the skills I am going to touch upon in order to measure the students' learning, reflect on the outcome of the lesson, and plan the follow up accordingly – differentiated instruction. These daily objectives are stated according to Bloom's taxonomy so I can easily equilibrate the activity from the lowest to the highest intellective skills. The Bloom taxonomy includes six levels of intellectual behavior connected to learning: knowledge (recall data or information), comprehension (understand the meaning), application (use a concept in a new area), analyze (break down concepts into components), evaluate (make judgments), and create (create a new product or point of view).
Taking into account the long term goals, I will specifically implement the following objectives for the daily lesson plans:
1. read and understand, interpret, analyze and discuss excerpts from the novel
Under the feet of Jesus
by Helena Maria Viramontes, newspapers articles, photographs, and/or video clips/short movies;
2. understand the concepts of specific rhetorical and literary devices like point of view or narrative perspective, diction, allusions, figurative language, tone, setting, syntax, and structure;
3. Analyze, discuss, and write how the author uses literary devices to reveal meaning;
4. determine the purpose(s) and audience of each visual and non-visual document/text;
5. write close analysis of both the written and visual documents;
6. discuss the close analysis of the written and visual documents with peers;
7. compare and contrast the various written and visual documents, and draw the appropriate conclusions;
8. write analytical essays;
9. choose a genre and write a fictional and/or non-fictional work.