Monday, December 8, 2008
Novel Unit
Unit Calendar Jim the Boy Publish at Scribd or explore others:
Jim the Boy Teaching Rationale:
Intended Audience
Jim the Boy is a fast paced read with a plot that keeps you flipping the pages. The readability level of this book is as young as a fifth grade student but based on the lessons created for this novel the intended audience is a 10 R class. There are many themes presented in this novel. Some examples are familial relationships, rivalry and friendship, finding oneself, boyhood, and the Great Depression. These themes are accessible issues that a tenth grade audience is capable to retrieve through a close reading of the text. The novel spans through one year in Jim’s life. The trials of his boyhood provide a sad yet sweet representation of growing up during the Great Depression in AlliceVille, North Carolina.
Why teach Jim the Boy
The story of Jim presents an example of the wholesome affect a family dynamic can have on an individual. Life for Jim is not always easy. He is the only child of the family having to live up to the manly expectations required from him by his uncles and still remain the sweet young boy for his mother. Growing up with no father, even though there were still male figures in his life, Jim was having difficulty coping. It was necessary for Jim to struggle growing up in order to have closure on his father’s death. Students or readers of any age can relate to the struggle of coming of age and coping with the loss of someone. Because the students will have an easy time relating to the story line, the language and rhetorical strategies employed by Tony Earley come to the forefront for teaching.
Earley’s usage of imagery, allusion, metaphors, suspense and narrative style provide an abundance of elements for any teacher to pull out of the text to create lessons. Not only does the book provide an outlet to discuss literary elements, it also portrays literary merit. The explicit morals of the novel take the individual back to basic human kindness.
This Novel Unit
This novel unit is 10 lessons with a day-by-day approach to teaching the novel. However, each classroom brings different levels of learning capabilities and the lessons can easily be adapted for each classroom. Lessons can be subtracted, or new lessons can be added to the unit. This unit offers a wide range of activities which adhere to the different intelligences for all students to succeed.
*This novel unit was in large part inspired by a mixture of pedagogies learned throughout Methods I and II during my career at Stony Brook University. The performance and technology aspects to the lessons were birthed from Methods II class wiki and through the class objectives.
