LESSON PLAN NO.
TEACHER: Hisem Gabriela
DATE:
SCHOOL: Liceul de Artă „Ciprian Porumbescu” Suceava
OBJECT: English
LEVEL:at least intermediate
LESSON: From books to films – Lord of the Rings
TYPE OF LESSON:
TIME: 50 minutes
CLASS: 9-12TH grades
SKILLS:
Reading
Speaking
Writing
Listening
LESSON AIDS
Handouts
Blackboard
laptop
video-projector
LESSON AIMS: at the end of the lesson, the pupils will know how
to identify the differences between a book and a movie on a specific scene;
to make a written comparison between a book and a movie
to express their genuine opinion on a book or film bringing pertinent
arguments.
to acquire new information an J.R.R. Tolkien
to understand the difference between fantasy and science fiction
TYPE OF LESSON: mixed
RESOURCES: excerpt from the Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, a video with the scene
in the movie (from youtube), wikipedia
STAGES OF THE LESSON
1. ACTIVITY/CLASS ORGANISATION - SPEAKING, WRITING (10 min)
Teacher will check homework and then will show the book The Lord of the Rings to
the students asking them to what literary genre belongs this book. Generally they say either
fantasy or science fiction.Here the teacher should point aut that:
- the fantastic deals with imaginary beeing, such as fairies, gnoms, elves, angels, orcs,
dragons, etc, and with talking objects or animals, the setting time being uncertain, in a very
remote past. That world never existed and will never exist.
- the sci-fi deals with other planets, ETs, space-ships, travel into space and/or time,
high tech and usually the setting time is in the future. That world is possible to be partly real
sometime.These simple definitions can be written on the blackboard/copybooks, and also the
teacher can ask the students to give some examples og books and films from both categories.
For example, the fairy tales are fantasy, The Foundation by Isac Asimov is sci-fi.
Harry Potter is fantasy, Star Wars or Avatar are sci-fi.
2. ACTIVITY – SPEAKING AND WRITING (10 MIN)
The teacher asks the students what they know about Tolkien. Usually they do not
know many things, so the teacher gives them some essential fatcs about him, writing on the
blackboard a few pieces of information he has previously taken from the internet (wikipedia).
The next they will speak about the subject of the trilogy – assuming most of them has
seen the movies – and bring arguments for or against the main plot.
3. ACTIVITY – LISTENING (OR SILENT READING) AND SPEAKING (5 MIN)
The teacher has here two options: to give the students some papers with the written
original text of Frodo’s speech at his 111th anniversary, or to use an audio-book that can be
found on youtube. The students will read or listen to that part from the 1st chapter of the
book. At the end the teacher will ask the students what details they memorised.
4. ACTIVITY – WATCHING A MOVIE SCENE, SPEAKING, WRITING (15
MIN.)
Then on the video-projector is put the same scene taken from the movie. The
differences are obvious, the excerpt in the book being much more detailed. The students have
to speak about them and to list on their notebooks the main differences between what they
heard/read and what they saw.
5. ACTIVITY – SPEAKING, WRITING (10 MIN.)
The teachers asks the students to identify the elements of the fantastic genre in the
Lord of the Rings (hobbits, elves, ents, Gollum, the magic ring, etc). The discussion can go
on the similarity between the words I and eye (Sauron is symbolized by an eye) and the fact
that the evil in this world comes from an exaggerated ego. If there is not enough time for it,
the teacher can give this idea to be enlarged as homework for the next time.
Note: the whole trilogy (book) can be downloaded from here:
https://sites.google.com/site/ebookdlspot/the-lord-of-the-rings
Fact-file on Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892 - 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist and
university professor, best known for classic fantasy books: Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The
Lord of the Rings. They form a complex of intertwined stories and poems, as well as fictional
stories, invented dialects, and essays about imaginary worlds.
J. R. R. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon literature at Oxford from 1925 to
1945 and a professor of English language and literature from 1945 to 1959.
Due to the success of his books, Tolkien is now considered the "father" of modern
fantasy literature. The Times ranked him 6th on the list of the best British writers since 1945.
