The Joy Luck Club Lesson Plan | Introduction
This unit plan is designed to develop students’ reading, writing, thinking, reasoning, and language skills as well as their imagination and sense of discovery. It meets these goals through a series of exercises, assignments, and activities related to The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. The plan includes twenty-five pre-planned daily lessons based on the book’s sixteen stories as well as extra resource materials created to facilitate the teaching and learning of Tan’s book.
The introductory lesson introduces students to some information about China to establish a framework for their reading about Chinese mothers and daughters over a span of years. Be sure to explain the lesson’s purpose to students and encourage them to keep the new information in mind as they read The Joy Luck Club.
Because the reading assignments are based on the individual stories in The Joy Luck Club, they vary in length from Scar with nineteen pages to Magpies with thirty-three. The average reading assignment comes out to nearly twenty pages. Given the general complexity of the stories, we believe that they must be read and discussed individually.
The study questions-both short answer and multiple choice-are fact based. Students can find the answers to the 144 questions right in the text. We advise using the short answer version of the questions as study guides for students and using the multiple choice version for occasional or regular quizzes. Answer keys are available for all of the questions. If your school has the appropriate machinery, you might like to make transparencies of your answer keys for use with an overhead projector.
The vocabulary work is intended to enrich students’ vocabularies as well as to aid in their understanding of the stories. Along with each reading assignment, have students complete a two-part worksheet on words from the upcoming section of the text they are reading. There are 119 separate words.
Part I focuses on students’ use of their general knowledge and contextual clues by giving the sentence in which the word appears in the text. Students are to write down what they think the words mean based on usage. Part II nails down the definitions of the words by asking students to match the words to their correct dictionary definitions. By the time students have finished a reading assignment and concurrently done the vocabulary work, they should have a thorough understanding of each of the words.
After each reading assignment, students will go back and formulate answers to each of the short answer questions. Discussion of these questions serves as a review of the most important events and ideas presented in the reading assignments.
After students complete extra discussion questions, there is a vocabulary review lesson which pulls together all of the vocabulary lists for the reading assignments and gives students a review of all of the words studied.
In this unit plan, daily lessons twenty-one and twenty-two are devoted to extra discussion questions/writing assignments. These questions focus on interpretation, critical analysis, and personal response. They employ a variety of thinking skills and add to the students’ understanding of The Joy Luck Club. These questions may be used as either individual or group activities, but group work will better aid the students. Using the information they have acquired so far through individual work and class discussions, students can get together to further examine the text and to brainstorm ideas relating to the book’s ideas, themes, and characters.
There is also opportunity for students to gain experience in oral presentations in reading, in role playing, and in acting like one of the characters. An Oral Reading Evaluation form is provided for evaluating the reading.
There are three writing assignments in this unit plan. The first is to express personal opinions: students have an opportunity to think about and to present their personal views of some family relationships. This assignment helps students to think about the kind of intricate relationships presented in The Joy Luck Club. The second assignment is to inform: students are encouraged to think about a game they enjoy playing, like several of the characters play mahjong in the book. Students need to think through the game they choose and to inform others how to play it. The third assignment gives students a chance to write to persuade: writing from the standpoint of one of the “aunties” in the book, students try to persuade one of the daughters to take a different view of her own mother. The students learn to think about how to present one of the mothers favorably and have their attention drawn to Amy Tan’s technique of presenting characters in a variety of different lights and from a variety of different points of view.
In addition, there is a nonfiction assignment. Students are required to read a piece of nonfiction related in some way to The Joy Luck Club. After reading their nonfiction pieces, students fill out a worksheet on which they answer questions regarding facts, interpretation, criticism, and personal opinion. Students are given a wide range of possible topics for the nonfiction assignment and should be encouraged to write on something of particular interest to them.
The review lesson pulls together all of the aspects of the unit. You are given a choice of activities or games to use. All serve the same basic function of reviewing all of the information presented in the unit.
The unit tests give you an opportunity to test students’ acquired knowledge using short answer questions, multiple choice, vocabulary, and essay. For your convenience, two tests are available for short answer and two for multiple choice. An advanced test is also available should you choose to use it. Answers are provided for all questions on the short answer, multiple choice, and vocabulary tests. Approaches to answers are suggested even for the essay tests.
There are additional support materials included with this unit. The extra activities packet gives suggestions for an in-class library, crossword and word search puzzles related to the novel, and extra vocabulary worksheets. A list of bulletin board ideas gives you suggestions for bulletin boards to go along with this unit. In addition, there is a list of extra class activities which might enhance the unit or serve as a substitution for an exercise that you might feel is less appropriate for your class.
Answer keys are located directly after the reproducible student materials throughout the unit. The student materials may be reproduced for use in your classroom without infringement of copyrights. No other portion of this unit may be reproduced without the written consent of Teacher’s Pet Publications, Inc.
