home stretch

My co-op and I have been discussing lesson plans for the final three weeks of my time in the classroom before Christmas break.  He has been very supportive of my ideas and is excited to see me present lessons of my own. All of our classes have started reading A Christmas Carol and this unit will take them straight through to Christmas.  For my first lesson, I have decided to have the students participate in a role playing exercise, similar to our Shakespeare activity in Teaching English, in which students manipulate the actions of other students while sections of dialogue are read aloud.  Tomorrow, I aim to do this with the Scrooge/Marley's ghost dialogue as a way of student's showing their interpretation of Scrooge's terror during this section.  Another initial lesson/reading activity I want to try this week involves students isolating sentences,  phrases, and paragraphs they find value or importance in, and then discussing why students chose the text they did.  This will help students stay focused on the text during classroom readings.  The majority of the novel is read together as a class because of the difficulty of the prose for seventh graders, and students often tend to dismiss the text because someone else is reading.  I'm trying to find ways to keep student's focused on the text and follow along while someone else is reading.  My co-op has suggested that I teach my lessons for the first half of the day and then he'll teach my lessons to the second set of classes, allowing me to observe the changes and alterations he makes to my instruction.  I'm not sure how I feel about this yet, but I think it will be helpful and encourage me to continually improve my lessons.