Literature Clubs

More Writing Clubs

Hundreds of sites on the Internet provide story book content that TEARN members can convert into online lessons and lesson plans. For example, the World Wide School project provides thousands of ideas. These free, third party materials provide reading material as simple story text; illustrated or animated works; or complete movies.

Here are some ideas and steps to create TEARN lessons from these works.

Writing Club Ideas

• Writing Using Aesop's Fables (G1-3) A collection of 10 of your favorite fables makes an ideal course.
• Writing Using Anderson's Fairy Tales (G1-3)
• Classic Fiction (G4-6) Choose works from classics like Charles Dickens, Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Eliot, Mark Twain, Tom Swift, and others to create multi-semester courses for improving reading and writing skills.
• Shakespearian Works (G7-12) Assign one chapter per week from a Shakespearian work for an online course.
• History Club - Construct a history course using popular works like the Federalist Papers or the Declaration of Independence.
• Bible Study (G4-6) - Choose 10 popular stories from, for example, the Book of Genesis, for a 10 week course.

Members can also assign physical books to learners - and provide online learning activities for chapters of the book. Learning is not restricted solely to online activites.

Creating TEARN Lessons

Short stories, poems, and fables become simple lessons. Each chapter of a longer work becomes a lesson.

For each lesson, you can:

• Identify the vocabulary words used.
• Help the learner identify the expository components of who, what, when, where, and why. You can extend the components so that the reader can use their imagination to create similar stories in their writing.
• Help the learner identify the narrative sequence of events.
• Help the learner identify the descriptive aspects of a character or setting.

Each of the above becomes a small table of 5 to 20 rows of information. TEARN converts this table into hundreds of worksheets and games that learners use to comprehend, memorize, and develop predictive and inference skills.

Use the Nursery Rhymes lesson plan to see how content converts into TEARN lessons.

Multiple lessons can be created from a single work. For example, one lesson emphasizes vocabulary while another highlights the narrative sequence of the story. These multiple lessons can be assigned to a single week of the lesson plan.

Also, advanced clubs can assign 5 chapters of reading per week, each with its own worksheets and online games.

-Aunt Beev

posted by Dash @ 2:12 PM