Talking Texts by Lesley Roessing

Author:Lesley Roessing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2019-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Teacher Model Lessons

Before students choose a presentation style or format, teachers need to share exemplars for students to analyze and deconstruct, noting elements that were particularly effective and interesting. Multiple sample projects based on one short story is the most effective way. As one lesson, the teacher and students could read a short story together and then hold a short discussion as if they were participating in a book club meeting. They could then storyboard the text—summarizing the plot into approximately ten to twelve events, highlighting the main characters, and dividing the story into “scenes.” In the following, all the examples are based on the Langston Hughes short story “Thank You, Ma’am,” but any story appropriate for the class can be employed.

In “Thank You, Ma’am,” the main characters—in fact, the only characters—are an adolescent named Roger and a lady named Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones. For this text, the teacher would demonstrate writing and presenting an I Am poem as Roger or as Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones.

Another teacher model would be a Plot or character bag presentation. Examples of objects exhibited could stem from the first scene of the story where Roger, dressed in tennis shoes and blue jeans, tries to snatch Mrs. Jones’s large purse at eleven o’clock at night (clock). After the force of her broken purse strap knocks him to the ground, she tells him that his face is dirty (a washcloth).

To model a character bag, the teacher could introduce objects from Mrs. Jones’s bag, using a large purse as the actual bag holding the items to be presented; some of these objects could include a five-pound weight representing her strength, a key to her room in a boarding house, a small door signifying leaving her door open, the wallet as a object to symbolize her trust in Roger, lima beans and a package of cocoa from the dinner Mrs. Jones shared with Roger, a brush or a curling iron as representative of her job at a beauty parlor, and the $10 bill she gave Roger. As a guided practice in pairs, the class could list the objects that would be presented from Roger’s bag.

The teacher could work with two students to present a sample scene for a skit based on the story by staging the inciting incident scene from the story when Roger tries to grab Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones’s purse and falls, and she picks him up. They should also demonstrate the narrations leading to the scene and connecting it with the next scene.

As an example for a multimedia book summary, the teacher could reveal the images she might choose as she retells the story and ask students to suggest appropriate music that might accompany the retelling. An obvious choice of music to accompany narration of and images for “Thank You, Ma’am” is Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” as well as songs about stealing and songs about helping others.

Demonstrating a book trailer presentation, teachers can design and show actual trailers they created for

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