Leah and I chose Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" as the text for our lesson. We chose to approach the lesson as a pre-reading lesson. The aphorism "good fences make good neighbors" is mentioned several times throughout the poem, and it is obvious that the poem's two characters each feel very different about this aphorism.
For our lesson, we were going to explain what an aphorism was, and have kids list as many as they could. Then, we would pass out notecards with an aphorism on one side and either "pro" or "con" on the back. The students would then find the person with the opposite position and the same aphorism, and then these pairs would develop mock debates about the wisdom or lack thereof for the given aphorism.
While this might not seem to address one of the specific common core goals, we were using the lesson to develop persuasive skills and critical thinking. When the children then read the poem, they were going to take their own stance on wether good fences make good neighbors or not, but they then needed to cite specific lines in the text where one of the characters supported this claim. Here, they would also be practicing citing textual supports, critically analyzing commonly held notions, and structuring debate arguments.
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