Activity:
For the activity you can choose between reading chapter VIII, IX and X (one page each) from the book The Anabasis of Alexander, or watching the video: The Greatest Speech in History? Alexander the Great & The Opis Mutiny
Go to the website https://www.mystorybook.com/ and click on the button
Using text and images create a short storybook re-telling the Opis mutiny and how Alexander the Great regained the loyalty of his army. Write the story from the perspective, style or tone of your choice.
Note: You can write about the events that are mentioned by Alexander in the speech, but it is not mandatory.
You must share the public link of your story in the comments section of this blog
You can check some examples of storybooks here: https://www.mystorybook.com/library/storybook-101
Explanation: This is a writing and reading activity meant to identify key information from a text.The students must synthesize this information in order to present it in a short story. The activity is intended for B2 english level students that are being introduced to academic writing. That is why the activity presents some characteristics of the summary. The students can choose between reading a 3 page text , or watching a 7 minute video where the same information is presented with voice recordings, images, animations, sound effects and text. The texts are about Alexander The Great and the Opis mutiny, when his army decided to abandon him because he ordered his veteran soldiers to return home. They perceived this as an insult and therefore the whole army decided to return home. In answer to this, Alexander The Great decided to pronounce one of the most famous discourses in history where he reminded his soldiers of all they had obtained from him. The troops begged Alexandre for forgiveness afterwards. The biggest difficulty of the reading part is that, as the text is a speech, many past events are mentioned by Alexander the Great, then it could be hard to separate them from the events of the Opis mutiny, thus there is a note clarifying this difference. In the writing part, using the resources from the website my storybook, a website that allows “writers of all ages to publish a storybook with writing, illustrations, and characters”, the students must create a short story about the text (the Opis Mutiny). The objective is that students create a text using different modes (text and images), and thereby ease the task of describing the environment, the setting, objects, characters, etc. just like in the 7 minutes video.
Hello Anthony, this was an interesting speech. And creating a story to retell it may be OK but it won't go beyond repeating which is not always appealing for students. Perhaps, asking students to recreate the reason why he had to give this speech or what happens after the speech. Or what they would have said incase they were Alexander. Also, notice that the instruction was to design a lesson for a language class with functional objectives, but this lesson seems for a Social Studies class. You need to establish what functional and meaning objectives you are targeting and how through this and other exercises student will grow linguistically, pragmatically or other. So, it is good that you provide an example, and the software used is a good one, but you needed more focus.
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