The Odyssey

Xaarith Warsama
9th grade/English

Common Core Standards:

Phonemic Awareness, Word Recognition and Fluency
Acquisition of Vocabulary
Reading Process: Concepts of Print, Comprehension Strategies and Self-Monitoring Strategies
Reading Applications: Literary Text
Writing Process
Writing Applications
Communications: Oral and Visual
Lesson Summary:
The students will wrap up reading the last few chapters of The Odyssey and take their final vocab quiz, then
they will write an essay which is pertinent to the themes discussed throughout the text.
Estimated Duration:
This lesson will take about 100 minutes, I plan on dividing the lesson into 2 days with each class period lasting
roughly 50 minutes.
Commentary:
By this point the students should be familiar with the process of reading the text and taking a vocab quiz on the
content. What will be new to them is the writing portion of the lesson plan, namely the essay. To cut my lesson
plan down to 3 days, Ive decided to assume that all of the students in this class are fairly decent writers
already by 9th grade standards. I realize that this is a bit of a stretch, but lets try to make it work. What I hope
will get the students hooked into the lesson is the topic of the essay, the goal is to give them some creative
license with the essay so that it fosters some deeper thinking.

Instructional Procedures:

Day 1: The first 15 minutes of class time will be devoted to taking the final online vocab quiz for The Odyssey
on the students laptops.
The next 15 minutes will consist of the students and I discussing the last few chapters of The Odyssey, what
did they like about the ending, what did they dislike about the ending? Etc.
The final 15-20 minutes will consist of us reading our writers handbook and discussing writing conventions
and mistakes to avoid, I will then assign them the rough draft of their essay which is to be turned in the
following class period ( I would preferably have Day 1 of this lesson happen on a Friday so that the students
have more time to work on the rough draft of their essays)
Day 2: For the entirety of the 50 minute class, the students will engage in a writing workshop whereby the
class will break up into groups of 4 or so and peer edit the other members of that groups essays. They will
look for grammar and formatting errors with the help of worksheets that I will provide, and provide tips for
how to improve the essay. The students will then go home and edit their essays and turn the final draft in
online.

Pre-Assessment:
As a pre-assessment that I could perform prior to the students finishing their reading of The Odyssey, I could
have students break up into groups and discuss what qualities of Odysseus make him a hero. They will be
instructed to come up with at least 3 heroic qualities that he possesses, as well as at least 2 unheroic qualities
that he possesses. Then we can discuss modern day heroes (both real and fictional) and how their set of values
differ from Odysseuss.
Scoring Guidelines:
I will hand out participation points to all of the students who were present for this discussion and will
take note of their input so that I can use it tailor the essay guidelines to the class as a whole if need be.

Post-Assessment:
The post-assessment for this lesson will come in the form of a written essay, 2-3 pages long that addresses the
following prompt: What does it mean to be a hero? The students will have to write about someone that they
consider to be a hero, either real or fictional (examples include: Batman, Abraham Lincoln, Elon Musk, a close
relative or friend, etc.) and discuss what makes them a hero.

Scoring Guidelines:
I will grade the essays on a scale of 1-100 and dock points for spelling and grammar errors, page
counts that are too low, formatting mistakes, and not following the assignment guidelines properly. All

of this will be detailed in a rubric that I will provide to the students at the start of the assignment.

Differentiated Instructional Support

Describe how instruction can be differentiated (changed or altered) to meet the needs of gifted or accelerated
students: On Day 2, the students who have proved to be exceptional writers will be placed into groups with the
kids who are struggling with the aim of helping them edit their essays.
Discuss additional activities you could do to meet the needs of students who might be struggling with the
material: As Ive mentioned above, the students that are struggling with the essay writing will be paired up
with those that are very good at it in the hopes that they can help them identify the problems with their paper
and address how to fix it.

Extension
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
This is a site that aims to help students understand MLA format and gives great tips for improving your
writing.

Homework Options and Home Connections

The students will be assigned with reading The Odyssey outside of class on their own time. They will also
need to participate in a discussion board that I will create specifically to discuss texts weve read in class. The
students will be required to make one post every week that documents how they felt about the events that took
place in the text, so for the purpose of this assignment the students will make exactly one blog post as
homework wherein they discuss the end of the story. They will also each be asked to each define one vocab
word on the classs Quizlet account every week and the definitions that they provide will be the ones they will
be quizzed on in class.

Interdisciplinary Connections
Throughout our reading of The Odyssey, I could supplement my instruction with information about Homers
world in ancient Greece during the 8th Century. I could also take time to discuss the ancient Greek Gods that
keep popping up throughout the text and give the students a better understanding of Greek mythology.

Materials and Resources:

For teachers

Computer and Internet Access, a smartboard, and a projector.

Grading rubric, Peer-review workshop handouts.

For students

Laptops, internet access, and a smartboard I guess.

Key Vocabulary
There are many vocabulary words that the students will be required to learn prior to this lesson; Im not sure if
Im supposed to list all of them or not, lets not.

Additional Notes
I apologize if the lesson is not as heavy on the technology aspect, but the assignment is pretty straightforward
and I couldnt think of how to cram a lot of tech into it. I realize that this is not a lesson planned geared
towards speakers of other languages, well I did not have very many ideas on that front so for the purpose of
this assignment; let us pretend that I want to be just a regular English teacher here in the US.