Feathers for 1984

Sooo, my 1984 unit is winding down.

[Side note: I just gasped so hard I almost puked. I put my head down to think and as I opened my eyes I saw this HUGE SPIDER right by my eye. As I yanked myself upright, I noticed that it flew away... along my arm? Spiders don't do that... Turns out it was a big ol' ball of lint on the sleeve of my sweater that had picked up a hair or two... maybe coming out of the dryer, I dunno. Ugh. Heart rate is beginning to return to normal now, so back to the unit reflection.]

Crap. My concentration is shot. Vitamins and breakfast first, then I'll come back.

So, yeah. The scaffolding is throwing me off. I'm not entirely sure how to set things up so that the students know what is going on during the story. The opening lesson worked REALLY well, but I didn't have any additional supports set up.

1984 is NOT an easy book. I'm wondering if I'm asking too much of sophomores.

I think next term I'm going to do the first lesson, then have them go read, and in the very next lesson introduce SparkNotes. And then have the literature circle jobs set up so that they have to quote, cite, and explain a passage for each example they create. That way SparkNotes kind of sets a foundation for them, but there's no way they can JUST use the SparkNotes.

As we go along, I'll have a set of comprehension questions that they can answer using the chapter summaries. We'll do those in class, and then hopefully that will prepare them for doing the literature circle work on their own.

Then again, I should probably check with these classes at the end of the unit to see how they felt about it. Maybe I'm selling them short.

I just don't know. And that frustrates me. *sigh*

You can find my earlier 1984 post here and my earlier planning posts below:

I. Continuing: Ideas that worked well
II: Repeating: Ideas I didn't implement effectively
III: Discarding: Ideas I implemented that weren't effective
IV: Tweaking: Ideas that worked but might be improved
V: Exploring: New ideas for next year!