Frankenstein

I taught the introductory lesson for Frankenstein today. For their bellringer, I had students write down three things they knew about Frankenstein, then I introduced the idea of theme and wrote down the themes in Frankenstein. They had to choose one theme individually, then they got into themed groups and decided whether there was a positive, negative, or neutral connotation and provide an example (So a student might come up with: the value of exterior beauty over inner beauty, negative connotation, ex. people are judged by their outward appearances and not the kind of person they are). Then students used their bellringer (something they already knew about frankenstein) and predicted how mary shelley might use that detail in the story with their theme (So a student might have said "creature is made of dead bodies" and then connected that to theme of inner vs outer beauty by saying, "Shelley will have people react negatively to the creature only because he is ugly"). It was a little confusing because students didn't like the bellringer to class cross over (they had put away their bellringers and didn't want to recopy) but otherwise this worked fairly well. I'm hoping to use this as a reference point for discussion later on, but I'm worried that I didn't have a handout or anything for students that were absent. I guess that's the danger of being absent all the time, but I worry that I should be providing substitute materials for students that miss.