Thanks to Kathleen Joaquin of SAISD for making her lesson plans available to other teachers!
The Lightning Thief- Rick Riordan
Lesson Plans
Suggested topics to correlate: Greek mythology, friendship, overcoming adversity
TIPS FOR SUCCESS: The teacher should read the entire literature book as well as this packet
before reading it with the class. Each student needs to have his/her own copy of the book. Spend
10-15 minutes daily “playing” a game with the vocabulary words.
Many of the activities used in this packet may be used with any literature book. One, that I have
found extremely successful for summarization, is a “game” the students and I created. They
named it “Breakout”. Here are the rules: Draw a large circle on the board. Give each student a 3”
x 5” Post-It. Have each student summarize the chapter using only the front side of the Post-It.
This teaches them to minimize their summaries. Remind the students that a good summary
mentions what happened at the beginning, middle and end of the chapter, yet no great detail is
given. Once the students are finished, have them place their Post-It inside the circle (with their
name on the back of the Post-It). When all the Post-Its are in the circle, as a class, discuss what
events should be mentioned in order to be a good summary. The teacher reads each Post-It aloud.
If the students feel is was a good summary, it “breaks out” of the circle. Place it outside the
circle. If it is not good, explain what is missing and discuss where it belongs. If it is close to
breaking out, the students label it, “mostly out” and stick it on the circle, most of it sticking out.
If it is missing some criteria, the students label it “mostly in” and it gets placed on the line, most
of it sticking in. The ones missing a lot of the criteria remain in the circle. Reward the ones who
“break out”. After a few practice rounds, I assess this activity: I give the student an “A” if it
breaks out, a “B” for mostly out, a “C for mostly in, a “D” if it remains in the circle and if it has
nothing to do with the chapter it will remain in the center of the circle and receive an “F”. Even
though it is time consuming, the students love to do this activity and it greatly improves their
summarization skills.
The “Character Web” page is easy to do. In the center of the circle, have the students put the
name of the character. In the outer portion of the web, they place a word that describes the type
of person (characteristic) he/she is, for example, greedy, shy, intelligent, etc. In the middle of the
web, the students write a description of the situation from the book where the character displayed
that characteristic.
Good websites:
www.mythweb.com
www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/europe/greek/articles.html
www.theoi.com
http://www.wingedsandals.com/