This is the first in what I hope to be a long series of screencasts to help teachers and their students with the creation of Illuminated Texts.  This video introduces the concepts of Illuminated Texts - shows and describes two of them - and gives an explanation of The Illuminated Text Learning Center.  If you've ever wanted to know just what an Illuminated Text is - or if you want to hear a little history behind their inception, this would be a good video to watch.  The presentation lasts about 10 minutes. Read more »

A lesson as tied to the idea of the "text centered classroom" as anything else you will find at this website. It also owes most of its ideas to Stephen Booth. This group work (designed for 4-5 students) tries to show students in three parts (one done in front of the other) -- exactly why it is not a good idea to paraphrase Shakespeare --and why the actual words (as opposed to the ideas, plots, or themes) of Shakespeare's works are paramount.

Each part of the lesson is designed to be done before the other. It helps if you have a color printer to print out the last part which shows the rich word textures present in Shakespeare (and absent from paraphrases). This lesson is also a good way to prepare students for some of the "text-centered" ideas that will come later in their unit on Literary Criticism. Read more »

  A significant reworking of an earlier group work focusing on Chapters 9 & 10 -- the high priest Ork and the death of the Shaper and how it has left us alone.  I print this as a two-sided handout: on one side this group work, on the other a short account on the death of Verdi, and how the people of his town lined the streets with straw as he lay dying so that he would not be disturbed.  I also have the lyrics to the Simon & Garfunkel song, "So Long Frank Lloyd Wright," and invite the students to make comparisons.  A new version of the group work may also be found below.

Click Here to Download the Group Work.