"The girls had never been in love...Men were drawn to them, but one would not be courted without the other, even for amusement - they would not be separated. They were like Siamese twins" (p. 215).
In this introductory lesson to the last short story in the unit - Joy Williams's "The Girls," - we read-aloud the first several pages (p. 212-215) to discuss the nontraditional family dynamics at play and to explore the significance of characters' names. For Father Ice, Mommy and Daddy, and the girls, their names reinforce - in some way - their personalities and characterization. Therefore, in a matrix, we predicted the significance before-reading and then identified text details after-reading to confirm or invalidate our original thinking about the character names. Some of the names even went beyond their character's personality to reinforce the family dynamics. Any remaining time at the end of the lesson was allotted to the collaborative creative writing projects. Students worked in their groups on the beginning of their blog short stories, since the exposition paragraphs are written together instead of independently like the rest.
Before-Reading: Prediction Making
Predicting from Character Names Before we started reading aloud the introductory pages to Joy Williams's "The Girls" - our second and last short story in the unit, we predicted the personalities of three main characters (or character sets) based solely on their names. As part of their characterizations, characters often hold significant names that hint at personality traits or physical stature. In a think-aloud, the teacher modeled how to approach unpacking the names with Father Snow. In a Think-Pair-Share activity, we discussed other two remaining inferences.
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Read-Aloud: First Five (5) Pages of "The Girls" After completing the pre-reading section of our characterization matrix, we reviewed our "interesting words" anchor chart to refresh our knowledge of the during-reading strategy. The teacher prompted memory recall of the four classifications before projecting the anchor chart on the SmartBoard and prompting students to look them up in their notes. We will be continuing the vocabulary strategy and our AlphaBoxes throughout Joy Williams's "The Girls," as well. The teacher began the read-aloud, modeling fluency and expression, and student volunteers picked it up. As we read aloud the story and stopped periodically to reflect and discuss, we paid special attention to the family dynamics. We looked at whether they lined up with our semantic web brainstorming. Are the family dynamic representative of a traditional household or do they deviate? And if they deviate, in what ways and to what extent? We predicated the possible implications of any deviations we identified. |
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Verbal Irony: the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite.
Characterization: the process by which an author reveals the personality and traits of their characters. It involves the character's actions, the character's thoughts and dialogue, narrator description, and what other characters think/say about the character.
Interconnectedness: the quality or condition of people or things being meaningfully and/or complexly related or connected.
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Teacher Modeling for Character Name Matrix: Father Snow/Ice After reading-aloud the first several pages of the short story and discussing how the family dynamics in the story are atypical and nontraditional - and thus contradict most of the ideas on our semantic web, we completed a characterization matrix analyzing the character names because they reflect how the characters are "interconnected." Through a think-aloud modeling activity, the teacher demonstrated how to approach identifying text details that contribute to characterization, determining the implications of those text details by boiling them down to adjectives (descriptive words) that describe the character's personality, and then reflecting on those text details to pinpoint the relationship between the character's name and his/her personality. In the "I do," portion of this lesson, the teacher walked students through "Father Snow/Ice." When we saw the contradictions between Father Snow's name and his personality, we applied the literary element, "irony," onto the character name to describe its relationship to the character's personality. The teacher model is provided below. Use it as a reference to fill in the remaining two categories on the chart: "Mommy/Daddy" and "The Girls." The process is broken down into three steps on the matrix. The class worked in pairs to complete the last two characters on the matrix. |