British Romantic Movement - Lessons for the Classroom

This is a worksheet I set up for Ode to a Nightingale. It goes through it stanza by stanza, starting in the bottom left corner of the page. The only thing is that there's a reference to Ode to the West Wind, so you'll need to have completed that first. Or take that part out. The other thing is that the picture of the bird actually confused a bunch of kids so you might want to take it out.

In Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, Is the creature responsible for his actions?  Is he liable for his crimes?  One way to answer these questions is to psychoanalysis the monster and see if he should be held accountable for his actions.  Abraham Maslow attempted to synthesize a body of research related to human motivation.  He theorized that an individual could not develop into a healthy, well-balanced human being unless certain needs were met.  So that leads to the question: did the monster develop into a mature adult or was his childhood development so lacking that society cannot blame him for his actions? Looking at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, find evidence in Frankenstein that supports how far up the level of needs the creature developed.

 There are multiple goals of this book group unit. One goal is to survey some of the most important authors, genres, and trends in British novels from the first half of the nineteenth century. Also it is to focus students on developing their critical reading skills.
  In group and whole class discussions the students ask both formal and thematic questions of the texts, and engage with the issues raised by these novels as they encounter them, with a specific focus on gender, class, and nationality; the role of the reader and narrator; religion; questions of identity; love, marriage and morality; and that peculiarly human problem, money--what to do with it, how to do without it, how our societies consciously and unconsciously judge individuals on the basis of their wealth and power, or lack of wealth and power.

This assignment was inspired by the old Steve Allen PBS show - A Meeting of Minds - where Allen would interview and interact with actors playing famous men and women across the ages.  This assignment divides the class into two sections - Victorians and Romantics - and the handout details the research that they are to do, so that they can then act out (and video tape) interaction between the two. 

In this lesson, students are asked to annotate the text of "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The anticipatory set  includes discussion questions to guide students into the text. The lesson plan includes all procedures. The students annotated the text as a class on the overhead prior to splittting up into groups to go throught the rest of the poem. The guided questions for each section of the poem include on the surface and under the surface questions.