Dissemination
Title of Activity
Fat and Thin
Description of educational activity
Duration: 90 minutes
Pupils’ age: 15-19
Organization of the class of pupils: group work
The aim of the lesson: The aim of the lesson is to improve the reading literacy of the students. To improve their reading comprehension and to be able to understand and describe characters. Another goal is to make the pupils develop their skill of using the appropriate language structures to express their opinions.
Support materials: The text of the story.
Activities:
- The students individually complete the predictions for themselves in 20-year time.
- The students think about the social ladder and the factors creating one’s position in such a ladder. They discuss their ideas in small groups.
- Discussion, the whole group: climbing the social ladder.
- The students are given the text and they are supposed to follow possible changes in the characters’ behaviour.
- Groups of four. The students create three living pictures illustrating the development in the characters’ behaviour. The activity is followed by a discussion on the characters and the social ladder.
- Students work in groups of four and think about some situations when one needs help from the others. They illustrate some of the situations using drama.
Evaluation and assessment method:
- Throughout the lesson, ensure that your students are backing up their choices with accurate supporting details.
- Teacher's observations of student preparedness, and participation in group activities.
- In order to evaluate and assess the effective impact of the previous activities upon the students, they could be asked to write a short formal letter – a letter of application in which they include one of the model situations.
Effect of the activity on RSP reading: Practices that support students´ choice, collaboration, and shared control of learning outcomes can be linked to self-expressed interest in reading and engaged reading behaviour. Teachers can organize reading instruction to develop self-efficiency, competence, and engagement in teenage students.
Connection to curriculum
Grade: 1 – 4 grade of secondary studies
Curriculum: The study of literature is focused on reading and comprehending literary texts of historical and cultural importance and relevancy either in the world or Czech literature. Students are taught to work with texts and information in different ways, to adopt the processes of analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, generalization, abstraction, specification, comparison, organization, selection. The students should be able to interpret, summarize and evaluate the texts.
Knowledge:
- Understand the stages of development of a hero, common in almost all books
- Develop reading fluency
- Improve reading comprehension
- Organize information in a specific way
Skills:
- Use basic drama techniques
- Create dialogues
- Make predictions, deductions, generalization
- Compare and contrast
- Summarize
- Work effectively in groups, respecting others
Competences:
- Make connections between fiction and real life or personal experience
- Be able to visualize material read
- Follow specific instructions and conventions
- Support and justify an opinion
Bibliographic reference to be used during the activity
Anton Chekov
Love and other stories
Publisher: The University of Adelaide Library (e-book)
ISBN:
Page count:
Year of issue: 2014
Results
The expected outcomes of the lesson are:
- The students think about their future, are able to make predictions and support them.
- The students will be able to illustrate their understanding using basic drama techniques.
- To offer observations, make connections, speculate, interpret, and raise questions in response to the excerpts.
Recommendations
Both the teaching method and the text can help in increasing students’ interest in reading. This text shows a change of a character’s behaviour during a short time. The teacher monitors the students to make sure they cooperate effectively.