Chapter's 1-7 Lesson Ideas

[ryanboydryanboyd]

 Since there are so many characters throughout the book, I thought method to keep track of the character's is necessary.  This sort of evolved from Jo's post about using Facebook profiles as a during reading task to keep track of characters.  Basically, each student (assuming we are teaching a class of 16 students) would be assigned a different main character in the story.  Each student would then be required to create a poster that provides some basic information about his or her assigned character.  The following would need to be included:

-A picture of what the the student imagines the character might look like (the teacher may bring magazines to class for poster development days to help with this)
-One quote from the Westing Game that describes the character with an explanation as to why it relates to the character
-A brief description that illustrates what the character likes to wear, what the character looks like, and how he or she acts
-A brief description that illustrates why the character is believed to be innocent of killing Mr. Westing or not

Each week or class day, students should update a "status" on their poster by putting a new hypothetical quote that the character might say that is related to the events that have occured in the previous reading.  Post-it notes or some other easily removable writing tablet  should be attached for this to make updates easier to manage.
A second activity would come at the end of chapter 6.  The students would be assigned a 3-paragraph essay that asks them to explain who the student believes killed Mr. Westing and who they believe did not kill Mr. Westing. The students will need to have

[charstretch]

This looks great Ryan, thanks for sharing!

Also, in our discussions outside of this forum, you, Katy and I discussed some other ideas for these chapters, which can tie-in to the Facebook-based profile idea. We discussed mapping out the buildings, as well as the grounds between the apartment and the mansion, where students could post updates on their profile posters letting people know where they are in each chapter - or they could post on other students' posters, saying they saw them or someone else in a different location!

The class could create one big map for the whole class to keep track of, or the students could create individual maps for their characters.

We also discussed lesson plans for a week's worth of vocabulary from all of these seven chapters - but could not think of the best way to present vocabulary that doesn't seem boring or tired.

What came up were ideas to use the ball game - where students toss around a ball that has been stuck with a bunch of pieces of paper with vocabulary words on them, and then define the word beneath their left thumb. This would be done at the end of the week, to review vocabulary learned over the week. However, when trying to think of how to present the vocabulary without just listing off the words and their definitions, we couldn't think of too many options. Does anyone have any fun suggestions that they've used in class or heard of?

[kathvergo]

This is just to give some additional insights into what we have planned for the first seven chapters. Ryan and Charlotte have already given an awesome detail of what we've been stewing up so I'm just going to supplement that with a couple more ideas.

We decided that after the students have finished the first 7 chapters we would assign students pairs. In each pair they would be given a character to embody. Ideally there would be enough students (16) in order to have all 8 teams from the book represented (and even MORE ideally, there would only be 16 students in the class). Once in their teams, students would be presented a physical envelope with the same clues given in Chapter 8. With their partner, students would need to brainstorm what they thought these strips meant and FORESHADOW what would happen in the next set of chapters to come.

[ryanboydryanboyd]

I created a writing assignment to distribute to students.  The writing assignment asks students to focus on creating topic sentences as well as building sufficient support for the topic sentences through explanation.  I'm not quite sure if the length of the assignment (400 words) is appropriate for this level though.  Any suggestions?

[kathvergo]

Attached is what we have in lesson plan format.

[charstretch]

Here are some more supplementary materials for our lesson plans, including the Map Activity and a picture of an example map.