I was extremely nervous about teaching tenth grade Honors English at first, but once I started planning out what I was going to do, I felt a lot better.
To make things easier for myself, I created a unit plan for the course–the what, where, when, and why for activities, lessons, and novels we would read/do over the August-October months.
This is my plan for September and October:
To view the pdf versions, click here: Honors 10 – September , Honors 10 – October
These plans helped to organize my teaching, helped me know where to go next, and are the complete units for how I taught Old Man and the Sea and Part I of To Kill a Mockingbird!
The Honors classes challenged me to learn multiple ways to teach a concept and/or novel. I was continually looking for new and creative ways of introducing materials and always finding ways of making the curriculum relevant to their lives. I learned so much, read Old Man and the Sea for the first time, and really learned to be out of my comfort zone as a teacher–bottom line: it’s okay to be tough, in the long run, it’ll make the students better writers!