Bright Ideas Lesson Plans

My project is entitled, “From Amid to American Idol”. It all started when I introduced the vocabulary word, “amid” in context to my Tier 2 8th Grade Reading class. We were working on an important FCAT concept in Reading: Setting. I made up the sentence, “The haunted house sat amid the dead trees in the forest.” I then wrote the sentence on the board, and underlined, “amid”. From the context, the students could see that “amid” meant, “in between or in the area of”.. One student raised her hand to say that “amid” contained the first two letters of American...am...and the first two letters of Idol...id. I took the idea and ran with it.

Next week, when The News-Journal arrived, I asked the students to name their favorite American Idol contestants and judges. Of course, they all raised their hands with responses.....quite unlike the responses sent my way when asking the meaning of amid! We looked up the hometowns of Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, Clay Aiken, et al. Each student chose his or her “specialty”. Now my students have a purpose for reading each Wednesday’s edition in my classroom. For example, the “Simon expert” checks for the weather in London (close to Simon’s hometown of Brighton) on the back side of the Local Section, checks to see if any recipes from England appear in the Accent section, and checks for soccer scores of English teams in the Sports section. Another check is given to Section A (in the international news section) for events taking place in England. All of these brief weekly searches have helped skimming skills, also, which are a definite must to master for FCAT success. As a tertiary advantage, I have learned almost all the names on “that cool show”, and I intend to watch it, now that the new season has begun. I am no longer “out of the loop” when it comes to my students and “American Idol”; I am amid the “in crowd”!

Daphne Berish
Reading
New Smyrna Beach Middle

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