Monday, April 4, 2011

English Immersion

I was fortunate enough to be hired for a long term position teaching 9th and 10th grade English.  Of course I was a liitle worried when I found out that we would be beginning with Midsummer Nights' Dream in 10th grade and The Odyssey in 9th grade.

Second semester at the University of Dayton was keeping me busy as well as I studied for reading licensure.  It helped though because I knew how important background knowledge was going to be to the students before reading these texts.

In order to prepare the 10th grade we read about Shakepeare's background, the Globe Theater, Sonnets 18 and 130 (so we could compare and contrast them), Iambic Pentameter, we wrote our own sonnets, and had a Shakespeare festival so that we could understand the entertainment of the period.

The prep for 9th grade involved background on epic poems, gods and goddesses, mythology background, creating a poster about one god or goddess, and having dicussions about our favorite gods/goddesses/

After working on vocabulary for both readings our next step would be reading the texts!

I am looking forward to that but, the students are not!

Deb