Monday: I will be using the lesson I had planned for Friday. (again, the students took longer to complete
something that I had planned. I thought one day of class would be enough to prepare for the trial, but it
looks like it won’t be, and I want to make sure they are really prepared so that the trial is a success).
Added homework: read chapters 7 and 8.
Aly Rice
West Side Story
Week Five: Tuesday
I. GENERAL OBJECTIVES
a. Students will be able to explain what a literary theme is.
b. Students will be able to identify themes in several mediums.
II. BEHAVIORAL OBJECTIVES
a. Students will view an animated short, listen to a song, and read a short story. They will
record the themes in the videos.
b. Students will compare these themes to the themes in West Side Story.
III. MATERIALS
a. Animated short: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV_tZrQZyH0 Oktapodi
b. Song: Don’t Blink- Kenny Chesney
c. Poem: You Musn’t Quit
IV. PROCEDURE
a. MOTIVATION AND INTRODUCTION (16 minutes)
i. Take attendance (1 minute)
ii. Short quiz from last night’s reading (5 minutes)
iii. Students will be asked to respond to the following prompt:
1. What is a theme? (5 minutes)
iv. Students will share their answers and we will discuss what a theme is in relation to
literature:
1. A thought or message that runs through a story.
2. Often linked to a lesson.
3. There can be more than one theme in a story.
4. Some common themes are:
a. Love
b. Jealousy
c. Prejudice
d. Loyalty
e. Courage
f. Anything else the students come up with. (5 minutes)
b. DEVELOPMENT (25 minutes)
i. Students will be given a graphic organizer with three columns on it. One column will be
the name of an animated short, one will be the name of a song, one will be the name
of a short story.
ii. The students will be asked to write down themes that they see/hear in each of the
mediums as they experience them. (15 minutes)
1. We will watch the animated short, and the students will write down its
theme/themes.
a. Love
b. Persistance
2. We will listen to the song and students will write down its theme/themes.
a. Seize the day
3. Students will read the poem out loud and write down its theme/themes.
a. Perseverance
iii. Students will be asked to share themes they came up with for each medium. We will
discuss the answers. Which are themes, which aren’t? Why? (10 minutes)
c. SUMMARY AND CLOSURE
i. As a class, we will come up with a list of themes that occur in West Side Story
V. ASSIGNMENT
a. Read Romeo and Juliet synopsis
When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you're trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest! if you must - but never quit.
Life is queer, with its twists and turns,As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about
When he might have won if he'd stuck it out;
Stick to your task, thought he pace seems slowYou may succeed with one more blow.
Success is failure turned inside outThe silver tint of the clouds of doubt And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems afar;
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit It's when things seem worst that you musn't quit.
Aly Rice
West Side Story
Week Five: Wednesday
I. GENERAL OBJECTIVES
a. Students will be able to compare and contrast West Side Story with Romeo and
Juliet.
II. BEHAVIORAL OBJECTIVES
a. Students will identify themes in Romeo and Juliet.
b. Students will create Venn Diagrams to compare WSS to Romeo and Juliet.
c. Students will identify themes that exist in both stories.
III. MATERIALS
a. Homework worksheet
IV. PROCEDURE
a. MOTIVATION AND INTRODUCTION (10 minutes)
i. Take attendance (1 minute)
ii. I will ask the class to verbally give me a summary of the story of Romeo
and Juliet to make sure they all understood what they read last night.
iii. I will ask the students if any of them noticed that this story is very
similar to West Side Story. What are the similarities? (5 minutes)
1. Star crossed lovers
2. Lovers meet at a public event and share a romantic scene on a
balcony/fire escape
3. Male lover tries to stop a fight
4. Male lover kills a relative of female lover
5. Male lover thinks female lover is dead and wants to die because
of it
iv. Ask students if they can identify themes in Romeo and Juliet that are
also in West Side Story. We will list them (4 minutes):
1. Love
2. Betrayal
3. Hatred
b. DEVELOPMENT
i. The students will be broken up into three groups. Each group will
receive a large Venn Diagram. Their jobs will be to compare and
contrast WSS with Romeo and Juliet. I will give the students 15 minutes
to come up with as many ideas as they can and write them on their
diagram (15 minutes)
1. Ex.
a. WSS Tony and Maria, R and J Romeo and Juliet
b. WSS fire escape, R and J balcony
c. WSS sharks and jets, R and J Montagues and Capulets
d. WSS NYC, R and J Verona
ii. Once all of the groups have a significant number of items on their
diagrams, I will ask them to stop and listen to my directions. I will ask
the students to look at their diagrams again, and find anything on them
that relates to one of the themes we have been talking about. I will
give them markers, and I will ask them to make a key for their
diagrams. (5 minutes)
1. Ex. Pink = love, red= hatred, etc.
2. The students will circle all items that are connected to love in
pink, all items connected to hatred in red, etc.
iii. When the students have finished, I will ask each group to share the
similarities they have found by presenting their diagrams to the rest of
the class. (5 minutes)
c. SUMMARY AND CLOSURE
i. As a final activity to compare and contrast these two stories, the
students will work as a class to complete a chart which shows the
characters from WSS with their “partners” from Romeo and Juliet. The
chart will be up on the Smart Board, and the students will need to
figure out which character in Romeo and Juliet matches each character
in West Side Story. The students will also have the chart in front of
them. We will do the first few characters together, and the students
will be asked to complete the chart as homework.
V. ASSIGNMENT
a. Complete character comparison chart
b. Finish the novel!
West Side Story
Tony
Maria
Riff
Chino
Bernardo
Doc
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo
Juliet
Mercutio (decides to fight Tybalt himself when
Romeo won’t, is killed by Tybalt)
Paris (set up to marry Juliet, but she’s not sure she
wants to)
Tybalt (Juliet’s cousin, killed by Romeo)
Friar Lawrence (serves as a middle man for Romeo
and Juliet. Allows them to meet at his place)
West Side Story Romeo and Juliet
Tony
Maria
Riff
Bernardo
Chino
Doc
Explanation
Aly Rice
West Side Story
Week Five: Thursday
I.
GENERAL OBJECTIVES
a. Students will be able to analyze the entire work of West Side Story.
b. Students will be able to reflect on predictions.
II.
BEHAVIORAL OBJECTIVES
a. Students will re-visit predictions they made at the beginning of the summer.
b. Students will create and answer discussion questions about the final chapters of
West Side Story.
c. Students will write about their thoughts/feelings on West Side Story.
III.
MATERIALS
a. Student predictions
IV.
PROCEDURE
a. MOTIVATION AND INTRODUCTION (9 minutes)
i. Take attendance (1 minute)
ii. I will bring students’ attention to the predictions they made at the
beginning of the summer which are hanging on the wall. We will read
through the discussion and discuss which predictions were correct and
which were not. In the case that a prediction was not correct, we will
discuss how the situation did end up ending. (8 minutes)
b. DEVELOPMENT
i. Tell students that we’re going to be discussing the last part of the novel.
Remind the students that these chapters are the falling action and
resolution, and in order to really appreciate the story, we need to fully
understand how the story ends.
ii. The student will be broken up into three groups (chapter 7, chapter 8, and
chapter 9/10). Each group will be asked to come up with a list (2-3) of
discussion questions about their chapter to ask the rest of the class. (10
minutes)
iii. We will go through the groups in order of their chapters and discuss the end
of the novel. I will have discussion questions ready in case the discussion
runs dry with the students’ questions (20 minutes):
1. Chapter 7
a. Do you think Maria’s sisters have any idea that she is feeling
the way she does because of Tony?
b. What did you think about the way Maria reacted when she
found out Tony killed Bernardo?
c. Why do you think Tony wants to turn himself in to the
police?
2. Chapter 8
a. Baby-John wasn’t around much for the majority of the
novel. Why do you think he was focused on so much in this
chapter?
b. How do you feel about the fact that some of the Jets want
the Sharks to find Tony and kill him? Shouldn’t they be
trying to help him? “Them lousy PR’s don’t let up! I don’t
wanna hear nothing outa you that sounds like double
crossing talk. I got no love for Tony, but if anybody fixes him
it’s us. No spics. Do I hear any objections?” - Action
3. Chapter 9
a. What do you think of this reading from the book? “So she
pitied Riff and she pitied her brother, and would have
willingly, at that moment, given her life for either of them.
But to what purpose? Eventually they had to die…If they
had lived to grow a little older, they would never grow
wiser.”
b. What does Anita mean when she says, “I can’t understand
and I don’t want to because then I might understand…”
c. Why does Anita agree to go to Doc’s for Maria?
d. Why does Maria tell Officer Shrank that the fight was over a
Puerto Rican named Jose?
e. After the Jet boys try to rape her, Anita says that Bernardo
was right. What was he right about?
4. Chapter 10
a. Why does Tony want Chino to find him and kill him? (Doc
told him Maria was killed by Chino because that’s what
Anita told Doc)
c. SUMMARY AND CLOSURE
i. Tony saw Maria running towards him in her white dress right before he
died. What do you think Maria was meant to represent here?
V.
ASSIGNMENT
a. Write a journal entry (at least one page) discussing your closing thoughts/feelings
on WSS. What did you like about it? What didn’t you like? How did it make you feel?
Did you learn anything from it? What do you think happened to Maria after the
story ended?
Aly Rice
West Side Story
Week Five: Friday
I.
GENERAL OBJECTIVES
a. Students will be able to relate the concepts of plot, characterization, theme, setting, and
point of view to West Side Story.
II. BEHAVIORAL OBJECTIVES
a. Students choose and complete several activities from a “menu”
III. MATERIALS
a. Menu
b. All worksheet that go along with the menu
IV. PROCEDURE
a. MOTIVATION AND INTRODUCITON
i. Take attendance and collect homework (3 minutes)
ii. Students will be asked to help me create a list of all the different parts of
literature we have talked about this summer (plot, theme, characterization,
setting, point of view) (3 minutes)
b. DEVELOPMENT
i. Students will each be given a “menu”. There will be categories on the menu
(plot, theme, etc.). Under each category there will be several activities which
relate to that category. The students will be asked to pick at least one activity
from each heading to complete. The students will be told that they should do
their best work on these activities, because many of them will be included in
their portfolios. The students will have the entire period to work on these
activities.
ii. On the menu, some of the items say “worksheet needed” after them. I have
worksheets made up for each of these activities. The worksheets will be in
folders labeled by the category they are under. That is, the worksheets for the
plot activities will be in a folder labeled “plot”. The students may help
themselves to the worksheets they need.
c. SUMMARY AND CLOSURE
i. Before students leave class, they must write down one question they still have
about an element of literature and/or West Side Story. I will use these exit slips
to determine if there is anything I should try to cover in the final week with the
students.
West Side Café
Please choose one item from each course. Circle your choice, and complete the work that goes with it.
Appetizers (Plot)
Roller Coaster: Complete a roller coaster chart to show the parts of the plot of West Side Story. (worksheet needed)
DIY: Do it yourself! Create a new way to map the plot of West Side Story. You may use any supplies in the classroom.
Creative Writing: Pretend you are the author of West Side Story. What would you like the climax of the story to be? Rewrite it! (worksheet needed)
Main Entrees (Point of View)
Change it Up: Choose a scene from West Side Story and re-write it in a different point of view. (worksheet needed)
It’s All About Me: Choose a character from West Side Story and write a creative piece about them using first person
point of view. (worksheet needed)
Dessert (Setting)
Cover Art: Create a new cover for West Side Story that accurately portrays the setting of the story.
A Whole New World: Create a new setting for West Side Story. Draw a picture of it. How will the story be different in
this setting? (worksheet needed)