Reading in the Middle, Junior and Senior High Schools, Spring, 2010

From the Read Write Think website, I chose the lesson plan titled "A Poem of Possibilities: Thinking about the Future". The lesson begins with having the word "Future" written on the board. The teacher has the students write down the first couple of words/thoughts that come to their mind. The teacher then changes whats on the board to "Your Future in 5 Years" and the students respond by making adjustments to their initial thoughts. They need to write about where they see themselves in 5 years, what they believe they'll be doing, and what they hope to have accomplished by then. After this, they read "Ex-Basketball Player" by John Updike. They follow this with writing a poem in the same style but with the information they thought of for their future. Once this poem has gone through peer review, the students then turn in two copies of the final product to the teacher. One is returned with a grade, and the other is kept by the teacher to be mailed to the student in 5 years.
I really liked this lesson. I did something very similar to this my sophomore year of high school. My teacher kept our final poems and is mailing them to us ten years after we graduated.
I think it's really good to have students think about their near future and express it in a poetic sense.

My experience with the Anticipation Guide was a very useful one. I only had two changes from the before to the after sides of the guide, but when that is out of five questions, it's a pretty big change. I think when the right questions are asked, an anticipation guide can be extremely useful to students. It is also important to see how your opinions, thoughts, and reasoning change before and after reading an article.