Lesson Plan: Tracking the Characters of "The Count of Monte Cristo"

Reading The Count of Monte Cristo with a group of 8th graders is no easy task.  It is a challenging story with many characters and plot twists.  One of the main ways to review what was discussed in the book is to review each character, how they were connected, and what each character did.  In the past, this was done by class discussion.  Thanks to technology and a program like FreeMind which is used in this lesson, visual learners are able to organize their thoughts and reviews and better prepare for a test like this.  Here is the lesson plan that will accomplish it:

1.       This lesson is for a class of 16 8^th graders.  There are 7 boys and 9 girls in the class.  The class is a mix of rural and suburban backgrounds.  There are 15 Caucasian students with one African-born student adopted into a Caucasian-American family.  There are no special learning needs in the classroom.  This class is part of a departmentalized middle school within a 160 student K-8 Lutheran school.  About one-third of our school is Lutheran, with one-third some other Christian affiliation, with one-third having no church ties.

2.       The students have been studying The Count of Monte Cristo for the last two months in literature class.  They have become familiar with the characters and their stories.  They have had experience with characterization and plot analysis from previous studies.  For this lesson, the students will need to learn a mapping program.

3.       Objectives:

a.       The students will organize the connections and stories of different characters in The Count of Monte Cristo as a final review.

b.      The students will present their character map to their classmates.

4.       The students will turn in a map showing connections and stories of a list of characters provided by the teacher.

5.       This lesson is important in our review to wrap up our study of the book.  This book has many characters known by many names that can get confusing.  Since the reading of the book is completed, we can go back through and see all of the connections to help establish the overall story.  Using a mapping program will help organize thoughts and make a visual map of the story.  The technology allows for us to create these maps digitally in a way that is easy to edit.

6.       The materials needed are their The Count of Monte Cristo book, a class set of ipads with either Inspiration or FreeMind installed, and the teacher-provided list of main characters needing to be organized.

7.        

·         The teacher will introduce the lesson by showing some example mappings.  The first example will “all about the teacher.”  (This map will be specific for each teacher.  Constructing it allows you to become familiar with the program as well.)  The second example will be organizing a previous book we have read.

·         Explain how a mapping can help organize complex ideas.

·         Allow them to create a mapping about themselves to practice with the program.

·         Introduce the assignment of using the mapping program to create a character map for the Count of Monte Cristo using the list of characters provided.

·         They will work on this project in pairs.

·         Help get them started by going through the first few steps with them.

·         Allow for several days in class to complete the activity

·         At the start of each day, allow for 5 minutes of share time with one another in the class to share and brainstorm ideas and make sure all information is correct.

·         When maps are completed, students will share their maps with each other looking for differences in presentation, information they may have omitted, and that all information is correct.

·         Observations of other’s maps will be shared in a class discussion and turned in individually as an “observation log.”

·         Once all maps are shared, they will take their test over the book.