English Language Arts Grade 9-10
Educational Links

Reading: Literature Standard 5

Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it (e.g., parallel plots), and manipulate time (e.g., pacing, flashbacks) create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise.

• Choose Your Own Adventure: Hypertext Writing Exp.
  This lesson, from ReadWriteThink, combines reading and writing in a collaborative, small-group learning experience. It utilizes technology, specifically Web page design, group and individual work, and student self-assessment. After reading several examples, students will plan their own adventure story. They will be divided into smaller groups for each split in the story until finally the students are writing their own endings. Using Web-authoring software, groups will create their own Web sites with the parts of the story hyperlinked to each other.
• Listening to Poetry: Sounds of the Sonnet
  While teaching some of the formal terms used to describe sonnets will be one of the aims of this lesson, our starting point and central focus throughout will be learning to appreciate the sounds of poetry. At the heart of the lesson are its seven sound experiments, designed to help students understand how form, meter, and rhythm all combine to shape our experience of poetry, and the meanings we derive from it.
• Mark Twain and American Humor
  In this three-part lesson, students examine structure and characterization in the short story and consider the significance of humor through a study of Mark Twain's "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Students will analyze the use of literary conventions and devices to develop character and point of view in the short story; investigate the purposes and significance of literary humor; and examine Mark Twain's storytelling style in relation to that of other American humorists.
• Tales of the Supernatural
  Monsters have haunted the literary imagination from earliest times (e.g., the Cyclops, Grendel, etc.), but a particular interest in horror and the Gothic form dates back to the 18th and early 19th century. The goals of this plan are to explore the origins and development of a literary genre; to investigate how shared imaginative concerns link the members of a literary period; to examine the evolution of a literary tradition; to compare works of literature from different eras.
• You Kiss by the Book: Romeo & Juliet
  The goals of this lesson plan are: (1) To learn about Shakespeare's use of poetic conventions as a principle of dramatic structure in Romeo and Juliet; (2) To examine the first meeting between Romeo and Juliet as an enactment of figurative language in a context of competing poetic styles; (3) To explore the use of poetic forms to impart perspective in later episodes of the play; (4) To gain experience in close reading and the interpretation of verse structure and imagery.

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These materials have been produced by and for the teachers of the State of Utah. Copies of these materials may be freely reproduced for teacher and classroom use. When distributing these materials, credit should be given to Utah State Board of Education. These materials may not be published, in whole or part, or in any other format, without the written permission of the Utah State Board of Education, 250 East 500 South, PO Box 144200, Salt Lake City, Utah 84114-4200.