Student Description: Regular 5th grade classroom. Class is composed of twenty students, four of whom are ESL students. The ESL students have all been in the states in ESL classes for two years. Three of them come from South America (Colombia, Brazil, and Peru) and one comes from Greece.

Lesson Objective: Students will define ethical terms (love, honor, heroism) and defend their definitions.

Materials needed:

• white board
• characters from the Lady and the Tiger cut out.
• tape

Introduction/Warm-up: Talk about choices and consequence. Have the students volunteer their opinions on what a hero is. Ask other questions that lead into story.

Activity 1: Teacher reads The Lady and The Tiger out loud.

Activity 2: Students retell the Lady and the Tiger by acting out the actions on white board with cut out figures.

Activity 3: In a fifteen-minute free write, students write their own endings to the story.

Activity 4: Students share their endings with groups of four.

Activity 5: Students are split into teams: those who had the man eaten by the tiger vs. those who had him marry the other girl. The teams will debate and defend their philosophies. Additional questions may be posed by the teacher, giving each team a chance to respond. Repeat some of the questions from the warm-up. What is a hero? How important is love? What does love mean? Lead into more ethical questions. If possible, form a class consensus on the meaning of love, kindness, and heroism. Write these definitions on a sheet of butcher paper and put it on the classroom wall.

Alternate plans: If you don't have the right story, have one of the students volunteer one of the books they were reading during free reading time (make sure you've already read it) and use that instead.

Do a DL-TA with the book, and allow students to act it out. You can also have students act out this story instead of using the cut-outs.

Make sure they understand the story before you have them debate it.

Evaluation: After the debate, have students write another ending/second draft of story. Grade this paper on grammar and spelling, etc, with special attention to how well they understood the story and concepts discussed.