Title: Searching for one's true self

Lesson plan elaborated by: Monika Spławska‑Murmyło

Topic

About searching for the self. How to read and describe emotions?

Target group

7th‑grade students of an elementary school.

Core curriculum

I. Literary and cultural education

1. Reading literary texts. Student:

1) recognises literary genres: epic, lyric and drama; determines the characteristics of particular types and assigns the work to the appropriate type;

2) distinguishes epic, lyric and drama genres, including: a diary, comedy, epigram, sonnet, song, lament, ballad, epic, tragedy - and lists their basic features and indicates the genre characteristics of literary works read;

7) defines existential issues in the texts being studied and reflects them;

11) uses in the interpretation of literary works the necessary contexts, e.g. biographical, historical, historical‑literary, cultural, philosophical, and social.

The main aim of education

Educating the ability to read a literary work.

Key competences

• Communicating in the mother tongue

• Communicating in the foreigh language

• Civic and social competences

Learning outcomes

Student:

• describes the values that are guided in life, and what are the heroes of the novel Pozłacana rybka by Barbara Kosmowska;

• develops the efficiency of careful reading and listening to the literary text;

• sees and reflects universal humanistic values;

• explains what „empathy” is and be able to apply this concept in different contexts;

• creates consistent oral statements;

• discusses and philosophizes;

• read links in cultural texts.

Methods / techniques

• giving: describing, explaining

• activating: discussion, brainstorm

• programmed: using a computer

• practical: text exercises

Forms of work

• uniform collective

• uniform and differentiated in groups

• work in pairs

Lesson plan overview (Process)

Introduction

1. Teachers acquaint students with the goals of the classes.

2. The teacher and students launch the abstract „About searching for the self”. Students perform task 1 to warm up: they listen to the recording of the person who talks about their emotions accompanying the journey by the lift, and talk about the feelings she has experienced.

Realization

1) The students listen to the first part of the recording: an introduction to the reading and the problems of the text that will be discussed during the lesson.

2) Students read a fragment of the novel Pozłacana rybka by Barbara Kosmowska in the lesson „O poszukiwaniu siebie” on the epodreczniki.pl website. After reading the text, the teacher directs the students' work with the commands contained in tasks 2‑7. Students work individually or in pairs. The teacher can broaden the scope of questions for more, e.g.

• Describe your impressions after reading the text.

• Determine who the heroine of the story is.

• Think and say what is the person narration the Pozłacana rybka. Justify your statement.

3. Discussion. The teacher asks students:

● What is empathy?

● Did you ever meet an empathic person? Justify the answer.

● Are you yourself driven by empathy in everyday life? Constrain your position.

● Is it worth being an empathic person? Why?

4. Students arrange one sentence with each containing the words „empathy” or „empathic”.

5. Students perform a lexical task: combine the names of emotions with their definitions.

6. The teacher then asks one of the students to recall the features of the epic and the novel as an epic genre. The students perform an interactive exercise consisting of matching the genre features to each of the literary genres.

Summary

1) Students perform the last task: they write in a notebook a note in which they explain how they understand the concept of „everyday heroism” in relation to the discussed fragment of the novel.

Homework

Choose a specific emotional state, for example, anxiety, anger, joy, curiosity. Present it in the form you choose: art (eg drawing, sculpture, collage), musical (music) or verbal (poem, story).

The following terms and recordings will be used during this lesson

Terms

Texts and recordings

Searching for one's true self

Many contemporary ethics‑centred novels of manners focus on young people’s dilemmas, especially their relations with parents and peers, friendship and first love, i.e. on the popular motifs of this genre. The book “Pozłacana rybka” [A Gold‑plated Fish] (2007) by Barbara Kosmowska is one example here. While they are searching for happiness and their own path in life, the characters face various difficulties such as divorce of their parents, illness of their loved ones and financial problems. As youthful dreams clash with reality, the protagonists change: they adopt different approaches to life, they let their identity be shaped by their experience and they learn how to be “everyday heroes”.

This emotional coming‑of‑age story focuses mainly on establishing relationships with other people and gives a valuable lesson in the closely related ability of empathy, i.e. the ability to feel and share another person’s psychological state. Understanding another human being is the key to understanding and knowing oneself. The psychological portrait of „Pozłacana rybka”’s main character, Alicja, captures the process of emotional coming‑of‑age. The book’s multi‑level narrative, which is comprised of opinions on the events expressed by a teenage protagonist (objective narration), letters written by Alicja to herself (first‑person narration) and Alicja’s direct involvement in conversations (dialogues), help readers follow the novel’s lesson in empathy.