May Unit Plan: Literary Analysis Writing with a Character or Motif Focus

I’ve shared literary analysis writing units with you before (here and here and here), and I’m sharing another with you today. To start, let me point out something important: each of these units is different. Here’s why:

• No one-size-fits-all unit plan will ever work. So I can’t just reuse the same material and same lessons year after year.

• My students change. So, their needs change. Their interests change. My approach changes.

• I teach different texts with a different focus each year. This year, we focused on three big ideas in Hamlet: Tracking motifs, analyzing character, analyzing Hamlet’s mental health. (You saw some of that mental health work here.)

• I’m finding different mentor texts. And since the mentor texts show me what to teach, I am teaching slightly different strategies each time. For instance, every essay will have a conclusion. But the way these mentors this year conclude varies.

What does any of this mean to you? Well, I guess it means that your units, too, should be different from year to year. That you should view each unit plans with a lens of differentiation (“What does this literary analysis essay unit offer that the previous ones didn’t?”). And that you should absolutely feel empowered to mix and match them until you find something that works for you and your students at this moment in time.

Let’s chat about some of the peculiarities of this particular unit plan (and you can download it below!)