My Best Lesson Plans

So far this year my most successful lesson plan was built around the novel Hatchet. When my class started working on maps, charts, and graphs for their performance indicator I decided to take it a step deeper than just reading and analyzing them.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Hatchet it is a novel about a 13 year old boy who is taking a small bush plane to visit his father in the oil fields of northern Canada. During the flight the pilot and only other person on the plane suffers a heart attack and dies. Brian then has to somehow fly or land the plane. He manages to crash the plane into an 'L' shaped lake, and survive. Unfortunately the only thing Brian has with him that isnt sunk into a lake are the clothes on his back and a small Hatchet attached to his belt. With a little inginuity Brian manages to build a fairly comfortable life on the lake in which he is forced to survive for almost 2 months.

Throughout the book Brian describes his surroundings by using the shape of the lake as a reference point. For this lesson I collected quotes from the book that gave the relative location of key places around Brian's camp.

I began by breaking the students up into small groups and I gave them a stack of quotes from the book. Then students worked together to create a rough draft of a map based on the information they could infer from the quotes. After students had created a fairly accurate sketch I gave each group rocks, twigs, miniature trees, moss, paint, a toy airplane, foam board, a hot glue gun and various other natural looking items. They then used thier sketch and the supplies to create a three dimensional map of Brian's camp.

Here is one of the finished projects!