Living Texts: Analyzing S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders by Thinking, Reading, Acting, and Thinking Again

byCheree Charmello

Living Texts: Analyzing S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders by Thinking, Reading, Acting, and Thinking Again is an adaptable, English Language Arts unit that provides opportunities for middle school students to physically demonstrate their interpretations of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders through improvisation. The implicit purpose of the classroom activities is encouraging personal and social responsibility. Included in this unit is a sequence that can be used by students to efficiently and effectively interpret text. Both the interpretation strategies and the improvisational strategies are used within a performance sequence that uses each chapter of the novel as the foundation. Integrating these strategies will help students to interact with text through visual, auditory, and kinesthetic means, thus accessing each student's learning modality. Use of improvisation will help students to physically, linguistically, and artistically put themselves in the shoes of other people (characters), places (settings), and problems (plot) in order to help them see, hear, and feel what is going on in the words of the text. The unit's creation was guided by Common Core.

(Developed for Humanities [Cross Curricular Studies], grades 7-8; recommended for Language Arts, grades 6-9)


Comments (2)

    Sherron Clontz Clontz (freelancer, Dasma, Ca)
    Subject taught:
    form template
    Excellent blog post . I was enlightened by the specifics , Does someone know where I would be able to get ahold of a fillable a form document to complete ?
    Ingrid Hubik Freire (Makua Lani Christian Academy, Kailua Kona, HI)
    Subject taught: ELA, Spanish
    Interested in receiving a file of resources on The Outsiders In your Living Texts area
    Is there a cumulative exercise with this unit? How are the differing exercises graded?

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