Composition & Essays

Lord of the Flies

Other Studies

Poetry

Shakespeare

To Kill A Mockingbird

Brad Dingler, Chris Murphy, Lisa Yu

To Kill A Mockingbird

Grade level: 10

Twelve lessons at 75-80 minutes in length

Global Rationale:
Preparing for this unit plan was a collective effort. The advantage of this method allowed for a lot of creativity. Some of the issues that we decided to represent are:

  1. We felt that the driving energy in the novel was created by the complex interactions of different racial, economic, and social identities. We tried to represent this tension by asking questions and creating lessons that were more self reflexive than goal seeking. It was our intention to make the students ‘feel’ and ‘experience’ the novel in addition to simply reading it.
  2. The goal of this unit plan was to focus on a student centered learning approach.
  3. We wanted to include IRPs that focussed on identity issues. Because much of this novel deals with identity, we tended make identity a focus for our IRPs

In creating the unit plan, we wanted to address specific themes while still focussing on a reading schedule. Although the lessons we have planned include activities that we felt needed extra attention, we also wanted to provide an outline to ensure a structured reading of the novel took place. In our unit plan there is a brief outline of the main points and questions to ask for each chapter that can be used for pre-lesson teaching. We also wanted to try and create a unit plan that would bring the novel into the contemporary world. By focussing on different media formats (music, picture books, research lab) we wanted to bring the themes into the students contemporary world. Because we all believe that students lean best when they find information relevant to their lives, we really wanted to stress the student centered approach.