Lesson Plans

So, I was thinking about my self direct learning, and it occurred to me that I really wanted this to apply to my life and future career as a teacher. So, I started to think of the literature in terms of how this could best be taught in a high school setting. I also discussed the matter with my sister-in-law, Heather, who use to be an eighth grade teacher.
Heather had never taught Beowulf or the Canterbury Tales before, but she compared it to teaching Shakespeare. She said that introducing the plot beforehand is important because then the students don't feel totally lost as they are reading the difficult language for the first time. She also said that reading it in class is far better than making them read it at home because then you can include discussions and make sure all of the students understand the plot as they read. She also said that assigning a fun project makes it less of a drag. She also advocated worksheets, and translations.
I then looked around the internet for some interesting ideas for lesson plans on either Beowulf or Chaucer. A lot of people had their students make Coats of Arms for the Knight's Tale, or create Kinships for Beowulf. I thought that for Chaucer it would be a good idea to have students create their own pilgrimage group; I would ask them to create a group that represents the different classes of society of today. For example, a pilgrimage group of today could include a doctor, a computer programmer, a homeless man, etc. That way the students could understand more Chaucer's addressing of the various social/economic classes of the times period.

I really like coming up with lesson plans for the literature. I think i will continue this throughout the other units (it worked a lot better than my art research and seems a lot more applicable to my life).