Out of the Dust Lesson Plan | Introduction
This unit plan has been carefully designed to give teachers all of the tools they need to present twenty-four daily lessons on Karen Hesse’s novel, Out of the Dust. 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 having a dream. 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 chronological clusters of poems. The clusters are called sections. The assignments average fifteen pages in length, but that number is deceiving because the poems are often filled with information and dense with emotion and meaning. Students do approximately 15 minutes of pre-reading 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.
Although students can attempt the vocabulary work prior to reading the appropriate section of the book, it is probably best to encourage students 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 the entire poem. 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, which gives the teacher a choice of adding to the fact-based questions some questions that require more critical thought. These will be found in Lessons Eight, Nine, Eleven, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, and Seventeen. Teachers may use all, some, or none of these optional questions.
There are there writing assignments in this unit.
The first assignment, in Lesson Five, asks students to write from personal experience. They may write about their own lives, mirroring the kinds of information conveyed by Billie Jo Kelby in the novel, or they may write about Billie Jo herself, explaining why they would or would not like to have Billie Jo as their close friend. Either choice will encourage students to examine the text closely and to try to understand the heroine better.
The second writing assignment, in Lesson Ten, asks that students write to inform. Here students have an opportunity to choose something that they do well and then to explain to an audience how to do the activity. Because not all students know how to do something that they consider to be particularly interesting, they are encouraged to look even at activities like getting from one location to another, traveling the route they take to school. The activity doesn’t matter so much as that the students have an opportunity to examine a procedure, looking closely at its parts and explaining how to do the activity to another person.
The third writing assignment, found in Lesson Eighteen, requires students to write to persuade. Because they should have a firm grasp of the novel at this point in the unit, students are asked to write persuasively about it. The assignment requires the students to exercise judgment, to set criteria for what is good and what is bad in their opinion, and then to argue that Out of the Dust is either a good or a bad book.
The nonfiction reading assignment in this unit focuses on modern farming and is a precursor to the major class project topic. For the nonfiction assignment, students are given a variety of topics relative to modern farming 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 Modern Farming is an attempt to get students to move beyond the knowledge they acquire through reading the novel to gain firsthand understanding of the situation faced by farmers in America today. The project is geared to having students discover concerns that need addressing 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.
There are additional support materials included with this unit. The extra activities packet 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.
