Identifying the Tools
Connecting what students read to what they write is an important skill to build. It’s our job as educators to help students understand the many literary tools used in writing. In this free lesson plan, your students will learn about point of view, dialogue techniques, verb choice, and other literary tools authors use to craft narratives. Then, your students will utilize these tools themselves to produce their own original compositions. So, if you’ve been looking for a resource that not only teaches students a skill, but gives them a chance to practice it too, check out our lesson plan today!
About the Lesson Plan
The goal of this lesson plan is to identify the literary tools used in the creation of narrative writing. These tools include point of view, pronoun usage, precise verbs, sentence and paragraph variety, and tone and dialogue techniques. Students will also learn to produce original compositions which utilize these tools.
This lesson integrates Read Ahead AI to model close reading of “The Last Class: The Story of a Little Alsatian” by Alphonse Daudet. Start by utilizing Direct Instruction to model analysis of the first paragraph of the narrative. Next, you and your students will read several additional paragraphs, discussing their observations of integral parts of a narrative. Third, have students continue their discussion in small, flexible groups to finalize their observations of the features of narrative writing. Finally, students should focus on vivid verbs and specific nouns, removing markings from nonspecific nouns and general verbs and marking or emphasizing specific nouns and vivid verbs, to create a presentation using Read Ahead that gathers examples of the author’s use of these words.
Why Use Read Ahead AI?
All of our free lesson plans leverage the power of Read Ahead AI to help students become better readers. By showing readers key words and phrases before asking them to read, we can boost their overall comprehension. Furthermore, Read Ahead AI lets students choose which words they think are important. In this way, student voices quite literally become part of the curriculum. Time spent reading in Read Ahead is automatically logged as well.
If you haven’t already, you can sign up for a Read Ahead AI account here. You’ll need one to access the presentations we’ve made in this lesson plan. If you’re brand new to Read Ahead and would like a demo, we’d be happy to meet with you! You can sign up for one here.
Happy teaching!