Black Boy Lesson Plan | Introduction
This unit has been designed to develop students' reading, writing, thinking, and language skills through exercises and activities related to Black Boy by Richard Wright. It includes eighteen lessons, supported by extra resource materials.
The introductory lesson introduces students to some background to the novel through a writing and bulletin board activity. Following the introductory activity, students are given a transition to explain how the activity relates to the book they are about to read. Following the transition, students are given the materials they will be using during the unit. At the end of the lesson, students begin the pre-reading work for the first reading assignment.
The reading assignments are approximately thirty pages in length. Some are a little shorter and others are a little longer depending on where the chapter divisions are. Students have approximately 20 minutes of pre-reading work to do prior to each reading assignment. This pre-reading work involves reviewing the study questions for the assignment and doing some vocabulary work for 8 to 10 vocabulary words they will encounter in their reading.
The study guide questions are fact-based questions; students can find the answers to these questions right in the text. These questions come in two formats: short answer or multiple choice. The best use of these materials is probably to use the short answer version of the questions as study guides for students (since answers will be more complete), and to use the multiple choice version for occasional quizzes. If your school has the appropriate equipment, it might be a good idea to make transparencies of your answer keys for the overhead projector.
The vocabulary work is intended to enrich students' vocabularies as well as to aid in the students' understanding of the book. Prior to each reading assignment, students will complete a two-part worksheet for approximately 8 to 10 vocabulary words in the upcoming reading assignment. Part I focuses on students' use of general knowledge and contextual clues by giving the sentence in which the word appears in the text. Students are then to write down what they think the words mean based on the words' usage. Part II nails down the definitions of the words by giving students dictionary definitions of the words and having students match the words to the correct definitions based on the words' contextual usage. Students should then have a thorough understanding of the words when they meet them in the text.
After each reading assignment, students will go back and formulate answers for the study guide questions. Discussion of these questions serves as a review of the most important events and ideas presented in the reading assignments.
After students complete reading the work, there is a vocabulary review lesson which pulls together all of the fragmented vocabulary lists for the reading assignments and gives students a review of all of the words they have studied.
A lesson is devoted to the extra discussion questions/writing assignments. These questions focus on interpretation, critical analysis and personal response, employing a variety of thinking skills and adding to the students' understanding of the novel.
There is a group activity in which students work in small groups to discuss symbolism, imagery and themes from the novel.
The group activity is followed by a reports and discussion session
in which the groups share their ideas about the themes with the entire class; thus, the entire class is exposed to information about all of the themes and the entire class can discuss each theme based on the nucleus of information brought forth by each of the groups.
There are three writing assignments in this unit, each with the purpose of informing, persuading, or having students express personal opinions. The first assignment is to have students express their own opinions: students write a composition in which they tell what ideas and themes they think Richard Wright would put in a book called Black Boy today. The second assignment is to inform: students write a report in which they organize and compose the information they plan to give for their oral presentations relating to the unit project. The third assignment is to persuade: students write a persuasive composition of their own choice.
The unit project is in five parts. Students are assigned one of the authors Richard mentions after he has read the Mencken books. Students take the author, find out what Mencken said about the author, read biographical information about the author, read something the author has written, and read some critics' articles evaluating the author's work. Following the research and the related writing assignment, students each give an oral presentation. This project also doubles as a nonfiction reading assignment.
The review lesson pulls together all of the aspects of the unit. The teacher is given four or five choices of activities or games to use which all serve the same basic function of reviewing all of the information presented in the unit.
The unit test comes in two formats: multiple choice or short answer. As a convenience, two different tests for each format have been included. There is also an advanced short answer test for students who need more of a challenge.
There are additional support materials included with this unit. The extra activities section includes suggestions for an in-class library, crossword and word search puzzles related to the novel, and extra vocabulary worksheets. There is a list of bulletin board ideas which gives the teacher suggestions for bulletin boards to go along with this unit. In addition, there is a list of extra class activities the teacher could choose from to enhance the unit or as a substitution for an exercise the teacher might feel is inappropriate for his/her class. Answer keys are located directly after the reproducible student materials throughout the unit. Only the student materials may be reproduced for use in the teacher's classroom without infringement of copyrights.
