Finding creative ways to introduce a unit isn’t just fluff; research suggests that it’s essentially one of the most important aspects of lesson planning. In the article, “Piqued: The case for curiosity” the author reports that scientists are discovering that curious learners from low-income households perform as well as affluent students and that all learners are much better at learning information that they are curious about. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, found that “curiosity can predict not only how much teens will remember about a story they’ve read, but also how thoughtfully they reflect on the story’s characters.”
Therefore, tapping into students’ curiosity as you begin a unit will make the learning aspect of your unit easier and more enjoyable for students and teachers alike. If you can hook students at the start of a unit, then your job will be a lot easier for the duration of the study and students will be naturally more engaged with the content.
10 Creative Ways to Introduce a Literature Unit:
Some of these ELA unit plan introduction ideas will take virtually no prep at all while others will take a little more work. It is my hope that I provide you with a variety of ideas so that you can use the simple ones when you are crunched for time or the more elaborate ones when you want to tap into your own creativity!
Project ambient media as a hook
I will begin with one of the simplest yet most effective curiosity-sparking tools in my toolkit. If you have two minutes to search YouTube while sipping your morning coffee, then you have time to prep a creative lesson plan hook.
My husband introduced me to my FAVORITE ambient station of all time, and it’s been a gift that keeps on giving (kind of like the antithesis of that manual air mattress pump he got me for Christmas one year 😂😶). Since finding this special station, I’ve since thought to look for other thematic ambient sound stations to play when I introduce a new topic. Here are just a few to give you some ideas, so let your imagination run wild!
Getting ready to introduce a story with a forest setting or forest symbolism? There are hundreds of ambient forest productions on YouTube, and here is one. You can have your favorite selection playing as students walk in and then have them discuss with a partner why forests are often portrayed in a polarizing way in literature. Sometimes they are magical and sometimes they are terrifying: why is this?
Getting ready to read something spooky? Play this and have students brainstorm why your classroom felt a little creepy when they walked in. What elements did the creator use to produce this mood? Then, lead into your unit or story by asking a curiosity-inducing question related to the content.
Getting ready to start Beowulf? There’s an ambient sound for that too! Mead Hall Ambience, who knew!? As I know from experience, simply having something novel projected on your board can create such a buzz around a new unit! Students will walk in and immediately start asking questions about what you are going to be doing in class. This is what you want. This is that magic spark of curiosity we all should be striving for!
Want more ambient media ideas, check out this post: 5 creative ways to use ambient media in ELA
Play “What’s in the the Suitcase?” to pique interest
As my co-author Staci Lamb, once said in a presentation, “Kids are like cats. If you add something new to a room, they will investigate it.” Everyone laughed when she said this because it’s so true! If you don’t believe this, just add something random to your desk this week and see how many students come up to casually touch it or ask about it. You can use this natural inclination for curiosity to your advantage.
A fun and easy way to capture this inquisitiveness is to try one of Staci’s most popular strategies, What’s in the suitcase?! Here’s a summary of how it works:
In short, you introduce any novel or story by placing a bunch of random yet meaningful items into a suitcase (or some other vessel) and let it sit there in anticipation until it’s time to pull each item out and let students predict or infer what the item could symbolize. The best part? You can reuse the suitcase over and over again as you encounter the symbols throughout the unit!
A spin off to this introduction strategy is to just simply place weird and random things around your classroom leading up to starting a new ELA unit.