Ready-to-teach lesson
Analyze Characters
The Paper Bag Princess - Grade 1 - Short lesson
TIME
OBJECTIVE
17 minutes Describe how Elizabeth responds to a threat and to an insult, and what her answers have in common.
Essential question: Why does Elizabeth never argue with anybody?
Materials
Text to mark
PRODUCT
Paired speech bubbles, and the reply she leaves out
- • The book
- • Passage 5 - the cave door, and what the dragon has eaten
- • One response sheet
- • Passage 11 - the rescue, and what each of them says about the
- each
- other
- Prepared passages: Passage 5, Passage 11
- Lesson sequence
- 1 Launch - 3 min
- Focus:
- A threat, and no reaction to it
- Teacher direction:
- Read what the dragon says at the door - that it has eaten whole classes of children and will eat her tomorrow - and ask what most people would do. Then read what Elizabeth does.
- Prepared text:
- Passage 5 2 Teacher model - 5 min
- Teacher model:
- I read Ronald's speech and then Elizabeth's, one after the other, and I count the parts. He says three things about how she looks and then tells her what to do. She says three things about how he looks - and every one of them is nice - and then tells him what he is. She has answered him in exactly the shape he used on her, which is why the last word lands so hard.
- Prepared text:
- Passage 11 3 How she answers each of them - 9 min
- Focus:
- Never argues, always answers
- Teacher direction:
- Using Passages 5 and 11, write how Elizabeth answers the dragon at the door and how she answers Ronald at the end.
page 1
- Expected answer:
- The dragon tells her to go away, boasts about the children it has eaten and says it will eat her tomorrow. Elizabeth does not run and does not argue with any of it - she asks him a question about himself instead. Ronald tells her that her hair is dirty, that her paper bag is ugly, that she has no shoes and that she smells like a dragon's ear, and orders her to come back dressed properly. Elizabeth does not defend how she looks either. She tells him his hair is nice, his clothes are pretty and he looks like a nice guy - and then that he is a bum. Both times she answers without accepting the argument she was handed.
- Student product:
- Two boxes: what was said to her, what she said back
- Prepared text:
- Passage 5, Passage 11
Support & extension
Above: Elizabeth agrees with everything Ronald says about her and still refuses him. Explain why that is a stronger answer than arguing.
Below: Fill the paired speech bubbles, then write what Elizabeth does not say.
Assessment
- Says Elizabeth did not run away from the dragon
- Says she asked the dragon a question instead
- Lists two things Ronald complained about
- Says Elizabeth called Ronald nice-looking first
- Says she then called him a bum
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