This week we wrapped up our discussion of "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" by Rod Serling and did a bit of preliminary work for an upcoming unit on analyzing characters in literature.
After reading and discussing "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" last week, we watched the television episode in class. Following the show, we talked about the mood Rod Serling created and the techniques used to accentuate that mood like music, lighting, and tight close-ups on frightened faces. The students also had some specific ideas about what they would change in the episode if they had the opportunity to remake it. Tops on almost everyone's list seemed to be to film the episode in color. :)
Although Wednesday's classes were only 30 minutes long, students did a lot of great thinking in that short amount of time. They began the period by answering the question - "do you think that people in an unusual situation would behave like the people did on Maple Street?" For those of you who haven't read the script or seen the television episode, a power outage hits Maple Street and its residents don't know why. They become scared and blame each other for the outage, bringing the story to its climactic and chaotic end. (If you're intrigued by the story, you can find it on p. 667 of your child's purple text book.) Following our discussion about whether or not people would ever turn on each other in such a way, we read a brief account of the events that happened in Salem, MA in 1692. I was very impressed not only with the great connections students made between "Monsters" and the brief account of the Salem Witch Trials that they read, but also their thoughts about situations in history when individuals have been made to be scapegoats.
In addition to this work, students were also answering the question - "who do you think is most responsible for causing the chaos at the end of 'The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street' " - on their own in paragraph form. While most of this work was completed outside of class, students used Thursday's class to write, revise, and edit with the help of a checklist I provided. This analytical paragraph was due on Friday.
Students also practiced two specific skills this week. While writing an analytical paragraph, students learned how to use a direct quote in their writing when analyzing literature. Students will be using direct quotes often in 8th grade, so they got a bit of practice during this assignment. Students also began reviewing the two major forms of characterization used by authors, direct and indirect, and began to identify them in literature. Students will continue to study characterization and character traits next week as well as during a novel unit that will begin in February.
Returned Assignments
No graded assignments were returned this week.
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