Travels With Charley Lesson Plan | Introduction
This LitPlan has been designed to develop students' reading, writing, thinking, and language skills through exercises and activities related to Travels With Charley. It includes 19 lessons, supported by extra resource materials. There is an extra project at the end which would add 8 lessons.
The introductory lesson introduces students to the idea of traveling in America. 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 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.
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 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 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 project in this unit. Students choose a city in America, research a variety of aspects about that city, prepare a written report for grading, and give an oral report to the class. These reports can easily be compiled into a published booklet for all the students to have.
There are three writing assignments in this unit, each with the purpose of informing, persuading, or having students be creative or express personal opinions. In the first writing assignment, students write to inform; it is their written report about their cities. The second writing assignment is creative: students create an episode to add to Travels With Charley. The third writing assignment is both creative and persuasive. Students write an episode to add to the book, but this time the episode has to be Steinbeck’s encounter with a Cheerleader, persuading her to change her attitudes.
There is a nonfiction reading assignment. Students must read nonfiction articles, books, etc. to gather information about their themes in our world today.
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 unit test for advanced students.
There are additional support materials included with this unit. The Unit Resource Materials section includes suggestions for an in-class library, crossword and word search puzzles related to the novel, and extra 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. The Vocabulary Resource Materials section includes similar worksheets and games to reinforce the vocabulary words.
The level of this unit can be varied depending upon the criteria on which the individual assignments are graded, the teacher's expectations of his/her students in class discussions, and the formats chosen for the study guides, quizzes and test. If teachers have other ideas/activities they wish to use, they can usually easily be inserted prior to the review lesson.
The student materials may be reproduced for use in the teacher's classroom without infringement of copyrights. No other portion of this unit may be reproduced without the written consent of Teacher's Pet Publications, Inc.
