OCTE Fall Conference Resources

For those of you who attended my session Young Adult Literature and the Traditional Canon, here are the resources you requested (better late than never - sorry!).  If you have additional questions or ideas to share, please add them to the comments.

Also, you may want to check out the Pedagogy in Practice Wiki - there's a section on young adult literature with synopsis and helpful information on books you may consider choosing for your book club.  There are also some handouts from when I was a student teacher, which are good, as we discussed, if you want to see what not to do :)

Presentation Handout
PowerPoint Presentation

Leigh's Awesome Book Club Selection Sheet

Here are a few other items you might find helpful:
Book Club Letter Example
Book Club Meeting Record Sheet

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Note to readers: this post involves me thinking aloud.  This has been proven in the state of California to cause dizziness and fainting.  Consider yourselves warned.

So I have this great idea.  On International Talk Like a Pirate Day, I'm going to dress up like a pirate and do a lesson on how dialogue can give us information about characters; we can make inferences about the character by the way they speak.  Splendid idea, yes?

Problem is, my first unit isn't on character.  No sir.  It's on fix-up strategies.  Inferences are fix-up strategies.  But they are very complex fix-up strategies that should probably be taught after a student has mastered questioning, clarifying (of which inferences are a pseudo-subset), and predicting.  And teaching a random lesson that has nothing to do with your unit assessment is poor backwards planning (you know, when you plan the assessment first, then the lessons - whatever that's called).

So I am left with the following options:

1. Dress up like a pirate on the day I teach dialogue as a way to analyze a character.
2. Dress up like a pirate on the day I teach inferences.
3. Dress up like a pirate on International Talk Like a Pirate Day and do it anyway; this is going to be one memorable lesson and I can refer back to it when we touch on inferences and character.
4. Give a boring lecture on character/inferences.

Please vote using the poll at the top right hand corner of the blog¹.  If you're reading this on Facebook, you'll have to go to the blog: http://pedagogypractice.blogspot.com.  The poll closes in one week.

1. Yeah, I probably already know the answer.  Humor me. Go back