My unit planning! I would love suggestions!

My unit plan for literacy is a genre unit on historical fiction. Our district requires that we teach genre units as our English language arts material. Through this genre unit we teach both reading and writing. The issue with it is that it is already set up and doesn’t give us much freedom to try new things and teach how we would like to. Lauren and I team teach so we’re planning together and we’re trying out best to spice up the unit. We’ve found that one way we can make it more exciting for the students is to add group work. Right now the unit is set up where the teacher does read alouds to the students and then the students write about the readings based on a specific topic that relates to the reading. It is great for the students to make text to self connections or text to world connections, but it doesn’t allow them to improve their speaking which our students really need to work on. We also think that if their speaking skills improve, they writing would improve since students tend to write how they speak. My CT has done readers’ theatre with my students once and it went very well, but Lauren’s class has not yet done so. Lauren and I are going to try and incorporate readers’ theatre at least once a week because it will allow us to still follow the genre unit plan, but also add the speaking element and group work as well. We’re still in the planning process but we would like to try readers’ theatre a couple different ways. I think it could work well if we had the students break into groups and each practice a section of the reading that we script out for them. Then a few groups could share with the class. We also could do it where a few students in the class get a role and they share with the rest of the class following along. I think I like the idea of the groups better so that everyone gets a chance to have a part and also students who are more shy wouldn’t feel scared of acting in front of the whole class; however, it would take more time to do this. What do you guys think? Any suggestions? Or any other ideas to incorporate speaking while still following the genre unit? We also are hoping to try a fishbowl. We think this could really help our students to interact with each other and push them to have a class discussion. We are a little unsure of how we should scaffold this though because neither of our classes have experience with discussions even in small groups. We’re hoping to start with small group discussions about the books that we’re reading out or even having the students read the book in their groups and then discuss it. We were thinking at first we could give them a few target questions to discuss based on the reading since they’re not used to starting a discussion on their own. What do you think about this? Would it be better to allow them to start the discussion on their own? We don’t want to limit their discussion but we also don’t’ want them to sit there confused staring at their group members or getting off topic because they don’t know what to say. Once they’ve worked with discussion in smaller groups we thought we could then move toward the fishbowl leading to a whole class discussion. We thought we could open the wall that connects our two classrooms and have Lauren and I and our two CTS as the first group in the middle of the fishbowl having a short discussion about what we read aloud to them that day. Once we have our discussion in the fishbowl then the outside of the bowl would be open for free discussion of what they heard and saw and anything else they want to add about the group. Do you think this would be affective? Or should we start right away with a small group from our classes in the middle of the fishbowl? We were thinking once we do this then the following day we would allow the students time to discuss in their small groups and then take turns with a few groups in the fishbowl and others watching and listening and then commenting through whole group discussion after. This would also focus on their listening skills. More than one group would hopefully have a chance to be in the fishbowl each day and then the next time we fish bowl it would be different groups. We are hoping that by allowing them to have a short discussion with their groups before the fishbowl would give them a chance to practice what they want to say and have ideas in their head before they are in front of the whole class. After the practice fishbowl with Lauren and I are our CTs we would do the rest of the fishbowls with just our own classes otherwise it would be too many people on the outside for the whole group discussion. Does anyone have any good ideas of how else we could scaffold the fishbowl and discussion in general keeping in mind that our students don’t have any experience with it? We also want to incorporate peer editing in our unit. There are parts of the genre unit that have this so we could easily follow our genre plan and incorporate this, but our CTs have not yet done this and we’re unsure of how it would work. We were talking yesterday trying to decide if we should partner the students up beforehand. Should we partner low level writers with other low level writers and the same for middle and high? We were thinking this would work because then they would be at the same level as each other or close to it and be able to help each other with where they’re at. We figured if we had a high with a low then the low level student would greatly benefit from the peer editing session, but we’d feel bad for the high level student who would probably get nothing out of it and we also don’t’ want to make the low level student feel bad if they aren’t able to edit anything on the high level writer’s paper. Do you think it makes sense to partner them based on level like this? Or do you have any other suggestions? We think that peer editing is an important part of editing and also speaking skills, but aren’t quite sure how to start it. Now that I think about it though, peer editing could be a good way to scaffold the small group discussion as well because the students would be talking with their partners and discussing their writing. Discussions as partners could then lead to the small group discussion. This has just led me to another idea. Could we do peer editing in small groups? Then we could have mixed levels in the group, all helping each other so that all levels of students would benefit. Also, the more ideas the better so the more people the better! In general our unit planning is going well and it is helpful that the genre unit is so planned out for us since it’s our first big unit that we’re teaching, but at the same time it’s difficult because we feel restrained and are trying to get around that. Does anyone have any other ideas for our historical fiction genre unit? I look forward to reading about your lesson planning and how your units are going and getting ideas from all of you as well!