In-Class, Jan. 30th: Slang of Social Groups

Reading Assignment:

Read the chapter "Learning the Language" from A Not Entirely Benign Procedure by Perri Klass which deals with nurses' slang. I will distribute hard copies in class.


Group work (3 people per group): Create a WebQuest about another Group's Slang

This will be your first lesson plan, and it will be created as an online document.

Create a WebQuest (one of you has to sign up for a free 30-day trial). I will model how to get signed in. Here is one of my sample WebQuests: Anne Frank, for 11th grade German Honors
Another one: Helen Keller, for 9th grade English third track (learning disabled)

Write all your group members' names in this WebQuest.

Your task is to instruct a class of 6th grade English students in the slang vocabulary of one certain group of society. You have to match your information with the age group of your audience, which means that you should employ graphics (pictures, photos, colors, etc.). One of your instructional examples can be the text for our Blog 3 (the teacher from 1925 instructing his 9th grade about slang terms). I have emailed that to you.

Look up the slang vocabulary of one special group of society on the Internet.
Examples:
soldiers' slang (Slang from Operation Iraqui Freedom)
prison inmates
rhyming slang (England; Cockney)
police slang
computer slang
railroad slang
1920's slang
1960's slang
Mountain Bike Slang
Australian Slang
Death Slang
Antarctic slang
and many, many more sites.........

Create a lesson on WebQuest with links to your society's slang vocabulary that 6th grade students might enjoy. They need to get some background knowledge about the society you talk about, and they need to have online access to its vocabulary (insert the link!). They also need to be given a certain task (for example, a role play using some of those slang words, or a creative writing assignment -- be inventive!). Then, there needs to be some kind of assessment, which means you have to post your grading rubric on the WebQuest, so your students know how you are going to evaluate their performance/writing task.

What I will be grading about your WebQuest:

1) Adequacy for grade level (6th grade): pictures, right tone, motivation, colors, layout, user-friendliness
2) Content (information about the slang of one group of society, and why it is important to know about slang)
3) Links provided (WebQuests are for online perusal of students in a self-inquiry study)
4) Task(s) given (what your students have to do)
5) Assessment (how you will grade your students' performance)
6) Presentation of your WebQuest to whole class (5 min. per group; you just show it off on the smartboard, give some examples of the vocabulary, tell us about the task for your students, etc.)

Distribute the tasks fairly among your group members, so everyone gets involved:
Tasks
a) typing into the WebQuest
b) prewriting on paper, or in a word document
c) looking up matching pictures
d) looking up links to vocabulary
e) inventing tasks for your students
f) establishing a grading system
g) demonstrate on smartboard, etc.

Time for the whole project: 3 class periods (1 just for presentations)