The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe Lesson Plan | Introduction
This LitPlan has been designed to develop students' reading, writing, thinking, and language skills through exercises and activities related to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It includes twenty lessons supported by extra resource materials.
The introductory lesson introduces students to C.S. Lewis and his world. Students will work in teams to complete a questionnaire about the author of the Narnia Chronicles. 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 each; some are a little shorter while others are a little longer. Students have approximately 15 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 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.
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 10 vocabulary words for each 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 an 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 from the reading assignments and gives students a review of all of the words they have studied. One of these will take the form of “Vocabulary Baseball” which will allow students to demonstrate that they not only recognize a word from its definition, but they can use it in correctly in a sentence. Students are expected to use their vocabulary words in the three writing assignments.