A. Level: draft of lesson plan

I have a few suggestions to share with you about your lesson that might be helpful. I think it is a good idea to use something modern like manga to depict primary sources. When you do the discussions with your students will you have discussion questions or will they have questions prepared about what they didn't understand of the readings? Will you discuss themes? How will these discussions be structured? Will they be lead by you or the students? I think it will be useful if you read these stories aloud and perhaps use a reading strategy like jigsaw to speed up the process and better comprehension. Something that will be helpful is if you have the students storyboard the primary source material they will be depicting before you they do a manga for it. Are these manga going to be targeted to a particular age group? Maybe they can be targeted for 4th graders or some other particular audience. Can an extension to this activity be having your students go to an elementary school and read their manga to younger kids?

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. I love the suggestion of having them target the story to a particular age group and then sharing the projects with the younger kids. I've been wanting to do something like that for a long time, and it could work well here! We'll definitely be reading the stories aloud -- primary source material tends to be too challenging for middle schoolers without a lot of scaffolding. We stop and discuss what's going on a *lot*.

alevel i am tempted to adapt your lessons to my high school US history course. The use of art and having students create their own art in a manga format and citing historic key literature with universal themes is an excellent way to engage students in the learning process. A suggestion as I look at the web resources you provide in your lesson plan might be to perhaps even do a quick youtube search to see what video clips might assist you in showing students from kimonos to medieval Japanese society. Although the clips might not necessarily be very academic I find filtering through videos a useful way to locate some real good videos you can use in the classroom.

elopez: Thanks for the suggestion. I looked through a ton of videos and didn't find one I liked yet. It looks like it would be better to use a scene from a Japanese show or movie rather than one of the instructional videos and tourist clips I found so far. This will take some research.

Modified to incorporate changes based on group feedback as well as to include the full citation for the primary source document.