The Homecoming Lesson Plan | Introduction

This unit plan has been carefully designed to give teachers all of the tools they need to present twenty-three daily lessons on Cynthia Voigt’s novel, Homecoming. All exercises, activities, and assignments in the unit will develop students’ reading, writing, thinking, and language skills. In addition to the essential elements, the unit contains a wide variety of extra resource materials and suggested activities.

The first lesson uses a bulletin board activity to introduce the theme of what “home” means to different people. All subsequent lessons are designed to maximize the teacher’s time while assuring that students at a variety of learning levels are able to progress successfully through the novel.

Reading assignments consist of chapters of the book, beginning with Part I and continuing through Part II. The assignments average twenty-five pages in length. Students do approximately 15 minutes of prereading work in conjunction with each reading assignment. Pre-reading involves reviewing the study questions for the assignment and doing some brief vocabulary work connected to the section of reading.

The study guide questions are fact based; the answers are right in the text. These questions come in two formats: short answer or multiple choice. It is probably best to use the short answer questions as study guides for students and the multiple choice version for occasional quizzes.

The vocabulary work is intended to enrich students’ vocabularies and to aid in their understanding of the book. Students will complete a two-part vocabulary worksheet for each section of reading. 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 then write down what they think the words mean based on their usage. Part II nails down the definitions of the words by giving students dictionary definitions of the words and asking students to match the words to the correct definitions. There are a total of one hundred vocabulary words in the unit.

Although students can attempt the vocabulary work prior to reading the appropriate section of the book, it is probably best to encourage them to do the vocabulary work while they are reading. Thus the contextual clues that students use in understanding the words would include not just those in the individual quotes but those in sentences surrounding the quote and often in an entire paragraph. By the time that students have finished the reading assignment and completed the companion worksheet, they should have a clear understanding of the meaning of each word.

Students should be encouraged to use the study guide questions to round out their understanding of the text and to prepare for the unit test. The material covered in these questions serves as a way of reviewing the most important events and ideas presented in the reading assignments.

In this unit there is a Critical Based Questions Option (CQ option), which gives the teacher a choice of adding to the fact-based questions some that require more critical thought. These will be found in Lessons Five, Eight, Nine, Eleven, Twelve, and Fifteen. Teachers may use all, some, or none of these optional questions.

There are there writing assignments in this unit.

The first assignment, in Lesson Six, asks students to write from personal experience. Students are given two options. They may write about their own lives, mirroring the kinds of information conveyed about the Tillerman children in the novel, or they may write about one of the Tillerman children, explaining why they do or do not admire that character. Either choice will encourage students to examine the text closely and to try to understand the characters better.

The second writing assignment, in Lesson Nine, asks that students write to persuade. The assignment comes at the time that Dicey Tillerman and her family have decided to leave Bridgeport and seek out their grandmother. Students are encouraged to give Dicey advice, (1) to return to Provincetown, (2) to stay in Bridgeport, or (3) to go on to Crisfield to find their grandmother.

The third writing assignment, found in Lesson Thirteen, requires students to write to inform. Just as Dicey Tillerman is good at setting a course and reading maps, students are asked to choose something that they know how to do well and then tell an audience how to do it. Whatever process students choose, they will have to think through all of its steps and then convey the whole process to their audience.

The nonfiction reading assignment in this unit focuses on aspects of the area of the Chesapeake Bay and is a precursor to the major class project topic. For the nonfiction assignment, students are given a variety of topics relative to the Chesapeake Bay area and asked to choose one and read about it. After reading their nonfiction pieces, students will fill out a worksheet on which they answer questions regarding facts, interpretation, criticism, and personal opinions. You are also provided with a KWL (What I Know, What I Want To Know, What I Learned) Sheet that may facilitate students’ nonfiction reading.

The major class project is optional. Project Chesapeake Bay Country is an attempt to get students to move beyond the knowledge they acquire through reading the novel to gain firsthand understanding of a variety of facets of life on or near the Chesapeake Bay. The project is geared to having students discover concerns that need addressing educationally and then to address those concerns in meaningful ways.

You are encouraged to do group activities whenever time and circumstances permit. Numerous opportunities are possible for group activities throughout the unit.

Students also will have ample opportunity for reading aloud and making presentations. Also, a great deal of opportunity will present itself for having rich class discussions about the novel and relevant ancillary topics.

One of the most flexible sections of the unit is the Extra Discussion Questions/Writing Assignments. In this section you will find interpretive, critical, critical/personal, and personal response questions and quotations from the text that can be used in a number of ways. Some of these questions and quotations are used as the basis for parts of the unit tests.

Review lessons offer chances to review the novel’s main events and ideas and to re-examine its characters through vocabulary review and review with games and puzzles.

The unit test comes in five different formats: two different Short Answer Unit Tests, one Advanced Short Answer Unit Test, and two different Multiple Choice Unit Tests. Answer keys are given for all parts of all tests except for the subjective questions that appear in some of the tests.

At the end of Part I of the book is an exercise designed to give you and the students a change of pace through role playing.

There are additional support materials included with this unit. The unit resource 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 a variety of bulletin boards to supplement the unit. In addition, there is a section called More Activities which provides the teacher with even more valuable activities to choose from.

Student materials throughout the unit may be reproduced for use in the teacher’s classroom without infringement of copyrights. For a fuller statement of the Teacher’s Pet Publications copyright policy, see the back of the title page in this unit.