The above introductory lesson plan is from a short story unit that I did with my grade 8 students. In this lesson plan, I wanted to build rapport with my students on the first day, hence why I started with asking students their names and what they had done over the summer. I then played a rap video on the five elements of a short story and students had to write down the definition and give an example, either from the video or to think of they own. The lesson ended with handing out a sheet of short story terms and having students star the ones they had difficulty understanding or had never heard of, and checkmarks to the ones they knew.
This lesson plan is a continuation lesson plan for the short story “U is Part of Us.” This lesson plan went extremely well, as I was able to connect the lives of my students with the lives of the characters from the story. Students were asked to participate in class discussion in regards to their lives at home. They were then asked to create a pie chart with five categories and to give them percentages that equalled 100%. The point of the lesson was to illustrate to students that too much time spent in a particular category would cause them to be unhappy.