Sunday, November 17, 2013

Introduction to Symbolism through Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales


When it comes to identifying and analyzing symbolism in literature, students often find themselves struggling.


 I am planning to cover Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death", which is already challenging for many students due to its somewhat outdated language without the added pressure of analyzing the author's use of symbolism.

So I asked myself, 'what can I do to help ease them into identifying symbolism in literature?' 

Well, we started like any new reader would--with nursery rhymes and fairy tales.


Source:http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2009/9/28/1254148878993/Little-Red-Riding-Hood-me-001.jpg


Why such simple and perhaps even elementary fare? 

Actually, it's exactly for those reasons. Many students are already familiar with nursery rhymes such as Humpty Dumpty and Jack and Jill. The reading is almost ridiculously easy. 

However, our goal is for students to think symbolically as they read these stories. To ask themselves, "What here might stand for something else?" 

And nursery rhymes and fairy tales are rife with archetypes and symbols. After all, fairy tales are what our ancestors used to instill their values in their offspring and they are still in use today for that same purpose. 

So let's get started!


Pre-Assessment / Warm-up 


Have students write down in their journals: 
  1. A definition of the word, "symbol", in their own words.
  2. 3 examples of symbolism
A student's journal entry. You can see that he already has an innate sense of symbolism.

Afterwards, choose a random selection of students to share their definitions with the class. Write down the relevant pieces to come up with the class's working definition of SYMBOLISM. Also have students share one or two of their symbols. 


Presentation



Share with students your definition of symbolism and compare it with the class's working definition. 
As a class, go over what concrete and abstract mean and brainstorm concrete nouns and abstract nouns. 
My students came up with a variety of concrete nouns including: person, computer, paper, flower, and pen. 

For abstract nouns, they came up with: love, peace, freedom, liberty, pursuit of happiness, sadness...etc. 

(You can tell that they had gone over the Declaration of Independence recently in their social studies classes). 

I used one of my students' ideas (pen) to again illustrate the connection between the concrete and the abstract in symbolism. 




me: There is a well known proverb which states that the pen is mightier than the sword. Is this literally true? If you were in a fight and the other guy had a huge knife and all you had was a ball point pen, would you win?


students: (laughing) No! 


me: So that means that pen and sword here have symbolic meanings. They are concrete objects that stand in for more abstract concepts. What do you think the pen really means?




We established that the pen stands for knowledge, smarts, and peace. 
And that the sword probably stands for force, might, and war. 



Modeling


Read a simple nursery rhyme together with your class. We read Jack and Jill and Humpty Dumpty. You may choose to do only one rhyme depending on the time constraints. 

Source: http://www.mamalisa.com/images/mother_goose/jackandjill_willcox.gif

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.
Up got Jack, and home did trot 
As fast as he could caper
He went to bed and bound his head
With vinegar and brown paper.


I asked the students: 
  1. What does the hill symbolize?
  2. What might the fall represent?
  3. What two different definitions does the word, "crown", have? What do you think it means here?
  4. What does Jack falling down to break his crown represent? 
I asked the students to make a symbolism T-chart:




My students came up with rather insightful answers. They recognized that the hill goes up and down like life and life's obstacles. The fall represents hitting a low point in your life. Crown can mean your head or the thing that kings wear. Maybe Jack is a king or high person who ran into hard times and lost his throne. 

After hearing students' interpretations, I shared the historical origins of the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme, which actually is the story of King Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette. The aristocracy of France had lost touch with the way the commoners were suffering and kept raising taxes until the angry commoners had an uprising. The king and his queen were beheaded on the guillotine, losing their crowns literally and figuratively.  

Source: http://thebrightestman.wikispaces.com/file/view/Guillotine_Louis_XVI.jpg/129302097/Guillotine_Louis_XVI.jpg


Activity

Students working together in pairs. (They were too shy for the camera so I had to take a picture from the back).

Divide students into pairs or groups of 3-4 and assign them a fairy tale to read. Each story has several guidance questions. 

For example for Little Red Riding Hood
  1. What do you think the color red symbolizes here? What does it mean that the little girl wears her little red velvet cap everyday?
  2. Why does the story take place in the woods? How would the story be different if her grandmother lived in town? 
  3. What does the wolf symbolize? 
  4. What is the message here? What is the lesson to be learned? 
Each pair should complete a symbolism T-chart for their story.


We had discussed active reading strategies such as SQ3R in a previous class. So the students knew that they were to scan the story beforehand and read the guidance questions before reading. I reminded them to read the questions first and to use highlighters to highlight what they thought might be clues or answers to the guidance questions as they actively read the stories for symbols. 

A student highlighting as he actively reads for answers to the guidance questions and for symbolism. 

As the students worked together, I walked around the room listening to their discussions and gain a sense of how each student was doing. 


Some students needed me to prompt them with more questions in addition to the guidance questions already written at the top of the story. 

For example, a group was having trouble with the question, "What does the wolf symbolize?" 



me: What do you guys think the wolf might represent?

students: um... I don't really know. A wolf? 

me: Do you think the same things would have happened if Little Red Riding Hood had met a bunny rabbit?

students: No!

me: What's the difference between a bunny rabbit and a wolf?

student: A bunny is fluffy and cute. And a wolf...it's scary and dangerous! 

me: Good! So if the wolf was a person, what kind of person would he be? 
...etc


After the groups have had plenty of time (20-25 minutes) to complete their symbolism T-charts, go over their ideas together as a class. This is another opportunity to check on student comprehension. 



Post-Assessment / Wrap-up 


Using a different color pen, students return to their journals to write down explanations of what abstract ideas their symbols from the Warm-up Activity might stand for. 


This student's handwriting is difficult to read. But if you look carefully you can see that he has connected the concrete symbols he named in the warm-up activity with more abstract concepts. For example, "the cross would mean to save us..." He has made the connection between the cross and the idea of salvation.

Thoughts and Reflections


The students have a clearer idea of symbolism. Their definitions have moved from simply "something that stands for something else" to incorporating the concrete and the abstract.
Students successfully identified symbols in the nursery rhymes and fairy tales and were able to explain their significance and meaning. 

For example, the Red of the Little Red Riding Hood was not just a color she liked. It could also mean danger or boldness. It could also mean vanity or pride. 

I liked using "the Little Red Riding Hood" because it already gets students thinking about the symbolic significance of color (an important motif throughout Poe's "Masque of the Red Death"). 

"The Ugly Duckling" was another story I used for the group activity. The Hans Anderson version uses seasons (spring as the Ugly Duckling is born, and moving through the seasons to winter when he is fully grown and knows his true worth) to represent the passage of time as well as the cycle of life. However, I think I might look for other fairy tales with themes and symbols more in line with Poe's for next time. 

All in all, I am glad that I took the time to go over symbolism and how to identify and interpret it in simpler works before asking the students to do the same for Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death", which is a much challenging read. I hope that the students will be more confident trying to approach the symbolism in Poe than they might have been had I asked them to do so without modeling the process for them and having them practice it on easier and more approachable works. 


A wonderfully nightmarish illustration by Olga Deineko, c. 1910


15 Useful Sites for English Teachers

The web can be a great resource for teachers. I've put together a list of several websites that I've found quite useful in my time as private English tutor and web resources that I definitely want to try out once I begin teaching.  I hope others will find them helpful too. 


Curriculum Resources


Teaching rhetorical devices? Check out this site, which defines and provides examples of more than 60 rhetorical devices. 






Some students have difficulty adopting a proper formal tone in their essays. Help them out with this useful list of English words for essay writing. Commonly used phrases and words are categorized according to purposes such as "to conclude", "to indicate a cause or reason", and much more.  



Analyzing and understanding poetry can be difficult for many--students and teachers alike. This website, written by the American poet and scholar Timothy Steel,  contains excerpts of poems exhibiting all the popular forms of meter and breaks down the process of analyzing meter and its effects in poetry into approachable steps.




Many students may have a preference for ebooks. This site provides free ebooks in a variety of formats (PDF, HTML, and ePUB just to name a few). Many of the classics such as Jane Austen or Mark Twain, which are no longer protected are copyright, are available. If your school provides Ipads, you may think about using a ebook rather than a physical book. Ereader apps such as Kindle and iBooks allows students to highlight and make notes as well as look up unfamiliar words--all at the swipe of a finger. 


Looking for good short stories to share and study with your class? Take a look at this site, which contains stories from many  of our favorite American authors.  From O.Henry and Stephen Crane to Edgar Allen Poe and Langston Hues, it's all there. 






Instructional Ideas


Looking for some lesson plans or suggestions? Many an English teacher has been inspired by the variety of lesson plans uploaded on this site,



The National Education Association has some great lesson plans as well as tips on classroom management and teaching strategies. 







Founded by the famous creator of Star Wars, George Lucas, Edutopia is an invariable cornucopia of ideas and evidence-based strategies to help students "thrive in their future education, careers, and adult lives"





Wondering how you can get your students excited about writing? Check out the resources at the National Writing Project. The site has page dedicated to Teaching Writing with a multitude of categories. There are teaching ideas for all genres of writing--from academic writing to persuasive, and to poetry.



The IRA offers a wide variety of resources, from lesson plans (through the site readthinkwrite.org) to approaches to encouraging adolescent literacy or providing for the literacy needs of English Language Learners (ELLs). 






Technology Resources


Getting students to create cartoons and comic strips can be a great activity. Using this website is easy. Students can simply drag pre-drawn characters and objects onto frames and write their own dialogue in text boxes to create a comic strip to illustrate their understanding or interpretation of the stories you've been discussing in class or to storyboard or plan out their creative writing or personal narrative essays. You can also have them illustrate the elements of plot. 


Educational technologist, Kathy Schrock has put together a wonderful resource page listing a variety of useful apps (IOS, Google, and Android) that support students' learning across the different levels of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. Teachers need only click on the graphics to explore the different apps and decide for themselves whether they'd like to use it in the classroom. 


Have you started taking advantage of this great (and free!) tool yet? If you haven't you really should. The tool, which now even works offline if you have Google Drive installed onto your device, has wide applications in the classroom and at home. Students can work concurrently on the same presentation for group projects.The comments feature alone can be used by teachers to provide students with comments on their essays and work or by students to identify and label bias, the use of propaganda and rhetorical devices in examples of famous speeches or opinion essays. For students who love to use the excuse that their computers crashed before they hit save (the modern riff on the classic "the dog ate my homework"), GoogleDocs automatically saves all changes. 


Thinking about creating a classroom website? Weebly for Education allows teachers to manage and moderate their students' accounts, accept homework assignments online, and keep parents up to date. Students can also create their own websites and blogs using the accounts that you create for them. 



Today'sMeet is one of several free chat services which can be used for back-channel (meaning private and not open to the public) discussion with your students or with your fellow teacher colleagues. Just set up a chat room as well as how long you want it to exist and invite participants by sending them the URL. You can use Today'sMeet during classroom lectures or reviews so that students can chat questions and comments at the same time. Just make sure to go over etiquette and other rules to follow beforehand and give students some time to get used to the platform. Students can answer each other's questions or share additional information from their personal background or experiences or even previous classes--all while the lecture continues. 

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Entry Card: Pre-Assessment / Warm-up activity

Entry Cards make a great Pre-Assessment or Warm-up activity for lessons. 


Entry Cards, which are also known as Entrance Cards, allow the teacher to see how much prior knowledge the student has at ready to deal with the upcoming lesson. Depending on how your students do on the tests, you may find that you will need to go over concepts from previous lessons before moving into the next lesson.

On an index card or half sheet of paper, have a small number of questions regarding the concepts you want to make sure your students are already familiar with before continuing on to the next lesson. In my case, I wanted to make sure that my students were already familiar with the elements of plot:

        1. exposition
        2. inciting incident
        3. rising action
        4. climax
        5. falling action
        6. resolution/denouement 
So my card read: 

Name and describe to the best of your ability the six elements of plot: 
      1. _______________________________________________________ 
      2. _______________________________________________________ 
      3. _______________________________________________________
      4. _______________________________________________________
      5. _______________________________________________________
      6. _______________________________________________________


On the projector screen, I also had a PowerPoint slide showing the plot diagram to serve as a reminder. 

PowerPoint Slide demonstrating the plot diagram. 

The students should have been familiar with the concepts as we had discussed them in a previous lesson some time ago. For homework, they had also been asked to do a plot diagram for Mark Twain's "A Ghost Story", which we had read for Halloween. I was rather confident that my students would do well. 

However, as I did a walk-around to see how students were faring, I found that they were struggling more than I would have liked. 
You can see from Daniel's answers that though he has a good grasp of exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution, he has forgotten about the inciting incident and falling action. 


Cue the review! 

I had the students switch Entry Cards with a partner and then began going over each of the answers as a class, asking for volunteers to name and describe each element on the plot diagram. 

In order to make sure everyone understood the plot elements, I assigned each pair of students an element (e.g. exposition, inciting incident, ...etc.) to identify and discuss from the story we had just finished. Afterwards, we went over each plot element as a class, each pair announcing their findings to the rest for review. 


One thing I might change for next time is that I might give them the elements and have them just describe them instead of having to identify them from memory first. As we went over the elements, I realized that some of the students knew the function of each element but had merely been having difficulty recalling the specific names of the elements--one student wrote expedition instead of exposition but correctly described the function of the element. 

All in all, I was glad that I had done the Entrance Cards before moving on to my lesson on Edgar Allan Poe. His writings with their somewhat outdated English can be very challenging to students. I can just imagine how frustrated many of them would have been trying to identify plot elements within the more challenging text without having a better grasp on the concepts in the first place. 


So, a reminder to all the teachers out there that Pre-Assessment is a MUST! 
After all, how else will we know that our students are ready to move into the next lesson? 

Source: http://captaind.deviantart.com/art/you-shall-not-pass-7505473
If they are not ready for the next lesson, they shall not pass until we can make sure that they are ready.