SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY

CURRICULUM PLAN

Lesson Plans

Poetry Definition Worksheet

Overview

This web site was created in order to help students understand human interactions and relationships as shown by Edgar Lee Masters in his Spoon River Anthology using an innovative and interactive method. Spoon River Anthology is ideally suited both for an interactive project and for the curricular objective for the Montgomery County 9th grade English unit on Relationships. The anthology consists of 244 poems which are interrelated with characters who are mentioned in several poems, and the anthology in its entirety tells 19 interrelated stories. Interactive programming languages such as HTML along with Internet is ideal for exploring these relationships and linking concepts.

In the first year of the project, students identify the relationships contained in the anthology by creating web pages based on each character's relationships to other characters and then creating the hypertext links between the poems. By entering the data in a database such as FileMaker, students can search the web pages for interconnections among the characters.

In the second year of the project, students will use the web site created the previous year to identify and explore in depth the 19 interrelated stories. They will then create additional web pages based on their discoveries. Links to sites about the author and additional information discovered by the students will be added.

Specifics

The project will be implemented in stages. In the first year 126 students created a web page that analyzes at least one of Edgar Lee Masters' poems. The teachers were responsible for explaining and guiding the students to complete a poem analysis, using a HTML template for the individual web pages. The creation of these individual pages took place over a six week period.

Concurrently, a student intern with media specialist assistance designed the opening web page of the site and created the template the classes used. The media specialist provided technical assistance to the teachers and classes in posting the pages to the web and in using the template.

During the second year of the project, a new group of students who are enrolled in 9th grade English will continue the project by using the web site to identify and analyze the nineteen interwoven stories throughout the anthology. They will also create new web pages to be posted with their findings and possibly original art work. Other schools will be able to access and link to this site and feedback and discussion will occur.

We are interested in identifying classes who would be interested in adding to the database. Contact Laura Griffiths

Springbrook | Curriculum Plan | Other Links | About Edgar Lee Masters | Credits