09.13.16Helen Howell Shares Embedded Nonfiction Ideas for Macbeth
Helen Howell is English AST and Lead Teacher for Literacy at The Radclyffe School in Oldham, Manchester, UK, where the school has recently moved from Ofsted’s ‘requires improvement’ rating to ‘outstanding’ and enjoyed their best ever English results in 2016. As a result of their recent focus on using academic language, building oracy and grammar skills and generally reading more they are now well above UK National Average.
Helen has taken the idea of embedding nonfiction from Reading Reconsidered and applied it to her year 9 class, mapping out ten times in the course of the text where she could add rich nonfiction articles to help build background knowledge (and therefore comprehension) of Macbeth and also to help students get more out of (and better at) reading nonfiction by making it connect directly to their experience of reading Macbeth.
Embedding nonfiction “just makes sense to me,” Helen says. “It enables students to understand the world in which characters live (which can be quite alien to them) and their character motives much more thoroughly as well as giving them much-needed exposure to this kind of text. In our GCSE, students have to tackle unseen non-fiction with often very challenging language so it is essential we give them as much practice with this as possible.”
Anyway Helen’s list, which is a work in progress, struck me as incredibly rich and diverse. Some of the ideas on the list below are still just ideas–that is, Helen is looking for the right text to share–but she was gracious enough to share links to a found a few of the texts she’s already located that she’s really happy with.
Macbeth Embedded Nonfiction Ideas
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Embedded non-fiction topic
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Purpose for embedding
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Helen notes: “I altered this one before I shared with students to remove the spoilers!” |
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A big thanks to Helen for sharing her amazing work. And by the way if you’re trying to imagine what embedding a nonfiction text in a novel or other narrative looks like in action, here’s a video of Colleen Driggs in action.
By the way, several of these texts would be useful for embedding with lots of texts beyond just Macbeth. You could use the “power corrupts” or “ego and ambition” articles with about 6,000 novels each.
Thanks Helen
This is really useful! I was slightly disappointed that you hadn’t included more links. I managed to track down a few more non-fiction articles on common lit. The British Library websites is also an invaluable resource.
Cheers
Paul