Identifying Genres: A Lesson Series

Some of my students enter middle school already having read hundreds of books, having favourite authors and genres, and knowing clearly what they hate reading. Others, however, don’t identify as readers. They say they’ve attempted to read a book or two, but completed none. They say books are so boring they put them right to sleep. 

As the year progresses, the gap between readers’ and non-readers’ vocabulary, background knowledge and comprehension usually becomes apparent. This is when I start identifying lessons I can teach to ever-so-slightly narrow that gap. 

In this series, I share one such set of 5 lessons that help students identify genres more accurately. The lessons are:

1. Prior Knowledge Check
2. Genre – Meaning and Types
3. Realistic Fiction vs. Fantasy vs. Historical Fiction
4. Fantasy vs. Science Fiction
5. Science Fiction vs. Dystopia.

I will post the first two lessons today and subsequently one lesson every Friday.

Since making the slides was the hardest part of this plan, I’m posting them for free so you can save your time. You can download all the slides, both editable and PDF versions at the end of each post. The complete slide set of over 100 slides will be available for download on the fourth Friday.

My Context

The best lesson I’ve ever witnessed on genre identification was by Glenn Powers at CTL. He practically emptied his class library shelves, mixed up all the books and got students to classify and organize them. Through the lesson, they had all the discussions and arguments they needed about the defining characteristics of various genres.

I also love what Donalyn Miller shares in The Book Whisperer about how she teaches the same.

I, for various reasons, mostly logistical, couldn’t touch the books in the library. I needed to create a lesson that was completely slide-based and this is what I did.

Lesson 1: Prior Knowledge Check

This is one of those topics that is most likely not completely new to your students. The problem is incomplete knowledge and confusion regarding boundary conditions. As scary as it sometimes can be, I ask them what they already know. 

Reading responses to these open-ended questions and culling out patterns is time-consuming. So, I ensure that I’m not doing this lesson while I have other major grading going on. I could make my work easier by using Google Forms and multiple choice questions, but the number of misunderstandings that are revealed this way is so valuable that I go through the grind.

I analyze from their responses what key knowledge pieces they are missing, conflating or misunderstanding. I create new or make changes to slides based on my analysis. 

Here are highlights from responses I received from one of my classes: 

1. the conflation between genre and theme 
2. Is a story that’s inspired by true events nonfiction? 
3. What parts of a historical fiction story are historical and what parts are fiction? 

Additionally, in this class, I was having a particularly hard time during reading conferences because I found many readers reading historical fiction while completely oblivious to the fact that the events in the book such as the World War or the holocaust were real. Or, when the students identified the historical event, they sometimes believed that the characters too were actual people in real life. 

Lesson 2: Genre – Meaning and Types

In this lesson, I cover:

1. the meaning of ‘genre’
2. the difference between ‘genre’ and ‘theme’ (I have taught ‘themes’ earlier, and my students are good at identifying themes.)
3. the 3 main genres: poetry, fiction and nonfiction
4. that nonfiction is not always true and/or accurate
5. how our library classifies books that belong to multiple genres (I have made this a blank slide so you can talk about your library)

Here are this week’s PPTX and PDF files for download:

If you use these lessons, do write to me in the comments or email me at teachingtenets@gmail.com. I’m excited to know how your class went.

For more of my writing, visit my Substack: https://teachingtenets.substack.com/
-Aishwarya

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