Historical Fiction: Accessing background knowledge with Goin' Someplace Special

With Black History Month underway, I wanted to share a successful lesson I delivered in a fifth grade class that might help your students understand the historical context of some African American literature. 

In our fifth grade classes, our bilingual students are spending the whole day in English for the first time in their school careers. We have a wide range of levels of English acquisition, from students who just arrived from Mexico to students who have spent their entire school careers in our school. 

To help the kids think about what they already know as well as develop their English speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills, one fifth grade teacher and I planned some specific activities for students while supporting their historical fiction unit.

If you haven't read this story, you should. It's a sweet story of a girl who wants to go someplace special by herself. Because of segregation laws, she isn't allowed in many places in her town. She finally reaches "someplace special," and it turns out that it's a library. Sob sob sob. 

I figured that, if students didn't understand the historical context for a story, they wouldn't be able to explain how the event created the situation for the story. So to help students as we read Goin' Someplace Special by Patricia McKissack, we started out with some pictures.

I scoured the internet (it wasn't actually that hard) for photos that depicted segregation. I wanted actual photos so students could reflect on actual historical events and understand that this story was based on true events in American history.

We divided the kids into five groups and gave each group a specific colored marker. The photos were glued on to construction paper and taped to the walls around the room. Each group went to one of the photos and had three minutes to write everything they noticed and thought on the construction paper. They used these speaking and writing stems:

I noticed...

I think...

This makes me think of...

This reminds me of...

Then they rotated to the next chart and read what the previous groups said. After reading and discussing this, they added their thinking in their colored marker.

By the time they'd been through several charts, they started picking up language from each other! They were using each other's words such as "discrimination", "strike", and "privilege."

We gathered some very interesting and enlightening background knowledge. They had a lot of concepts and were able to connect historical events and people (such as segregation, Martin Luther King, Jr., strikes, Ruby Bridges, and Rosa Parks), but they didn't have specific vocabulary. 

We worked on giving them words to express their specific ideas. A few that came up were "segregation," "African Americans" as a replacement for the outdated "colored people" phrase they were using, and "separate but equal".

After visiting each chart, I told them that the historical events pictured in the photos would be the context for our story, so we had to have a good understanding. The teams worked on writing a single sentence that would explain the historical event. 

Then we started to read the book. Each student had a copy of the story and a post-it. I asked them to read to find examples of how the historical event was represented in the story. Students marked several places where we saw the conditions of segregation affecting our story.

Using the ideas that students marked with their post-its, we created a simple cause-effect map to explain how the historical events affected the story. Then students chose another event from the story and used the sentence stems on the bottom of the above chart to record their thinking about the historical event and the story.

Students were really able to explain how the historical events affected the story! The above student obviously has a stronger handle on English written expression with errors common to English Language Learners, but even our newcomers were able to produce some response.

One student even explained, "She wanted to get to the library because all were welcome there." Awww, what a message!

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Organizing Writing Mentor Texts

If you read my recent post about my closet, you are probably surprised that I would title any future post with the word "Organizing". My closet is, of course, an embarrassment I have recently shared with the world, but in general, I'm pretty good at creating organized systems. One of these I just started this year is our writing mentor texts library.  

Not all of these books are writing mentor texts but about half of them are!  

  It's working for us, so I thought it might be the perfect idea to link up with Primary Powers' Organization Blog Hop!

As a Literacy Coach, I help teachers plan for writing. Sometimes, we are desperate for another kind of writing model text for a specific skill or strategy, and we are stumped! To help us plan effectively, I started ordering books based on specific traits. You can find one of the lists I used here at Empowering Writers.      After the books came in, I set to organizing them. I wrote a specific characteristic of writing on each index card and made piles of books.   

From there, I divided them up into baskets and put them on specifically designated shelves:  

 I labeled each basket with the writing skill or strategy that the books were great models of. Some of these are great beginnings, great endings, character development, sensory description with the five senses.

Of course, Patricia Polacco gets her own baskets, as do these other great mentor authors: among them, Tomie dePaola, Cynthia Rylant, Gail Gibbons, and more.

To help us use the books well for planning, I made little stickers that go on the inside cover of each book. The image and label on the sticker correlates with the basket label. I printed the labels on sticker paper.

I cut them into strips to stick inside the books.

Here's how it works. This basket is labeled "Generating Ideas for Writing." In it, I also include books about the idea of writing, like "Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street" and "What Do Writers Do?"

This book, Little Red Writing Hood, tells a story of a pencil character writing a story. It blends Little Red Writing Hood with writing tips. 

 On the inside cover, I include notes: just some ideas about how to use the book to teach writing strategy.

Throughout the book, the tips about writing are interwoven with the story. I used post-its to mark pages where there were writing tips, strategies, or potential for teaching. 

It's still a burgeoning system, and we're adding to our library a little at a time, but it's a start! Want a freebie to get started? Grab the basket and book labels for free!   

  Check out our other organization tips by hopping to the next post - Mrs. Richardson's Class, and learn all about organizing guided reading groups!   

  Or, if you'd rather, start at the beginning of the hop and check out all the great organization tips! Pin It

Bright Ideas: A Blast From the Past!

November's Bright Ideas post is very unique. Instead of being a million brand-new bright ideas, we're giving you a change to browse through some of the great bright ideas from the last ten months that you might have missed! 

The Bright Ideas posts are great places to get interesting and useful tips and ideas to use in your classroom without having to download anything! No freebies, no products, and no hard drive space involved! Just good teaching and great tips.

These are my Bright Ideas posts from the last year. Check them out and maybe you'll find something new to try out!

I was extra-excited about this Bright Idea. This fun Creative Writing Response for Any Book! is a good way to get kids to respond to text while encouraging them to develop their writing vocabularies, too!

Setting Behavioral Goals  is a great way to get kids thinking about their own goals for behavior while encouraging teamwork, too!

 

 I love my color-coded Response Rings for checking for understanding. I hope you love them, too!

 

Personal Editing Checklists are a differentiated tool to help individual students develop a sequence for editing their own writing!

 

 My first Bright Ideas post was about Special Delivery Book Bags, a fun way to get kids excited and engaged in reading new books you introduce to the class!

  I hope you've found some useful tips here! If you see something you like, follow my blog Check out some of the other Bright Ideas Posts below!  

An InLinkz Link-up

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Author Visit: Donna Munoz: Harley Farley's First Halloween!

One of my fondest memories of my early teaching career is the day I met Rick Riordan. Our school had won the membership contest for International Reading Association, and our prize was a guest author visit. Rick Riordan had already written several novels for adults, and his new book, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, was about to be published!

Now, of course, Percy Jackson is a major series, has been a motion picture, and is loved by middle schoolers, high schoolers, and adults everywhere (or many places, anyway).

I believe in authors sharing their writing process with kids; encouraging them to write and read; discussing the challenges of revision; sharing where inspiration comes from. Because of this, we try to have at least one guest author each year to hopefully inspire our students.

Yesterday, we were absolutely blessed to have a lovely children’s author, Donna Munoz, come and share her writing and her process with our kids! I sat in on the fifth grade presentation and listened to her story about being the first person in her family to attend college, overcoming challenges, and loving her career as a teacher and a writer.

Her book, Harley Farley’s First Halloween, is available on Amazon in paperback and for the kindle. You can grab it here: 

It’s an adorable story about a zombie named Harley Farley who sleeps in a bunk bed in Eddie’s room at the top of the stairs! Eddie finds him one Halloween night and decides to take him trick-or-treating. It was really enlightening for the kids to hear about where the inspiration came from for certain details in the story; why Eddie’s “plan” looks like a football playbook, whose idea it was to include fried chicken in the story, and why the message of acceptance is so important.

Donna wrote the story collaboratively with her three sons around the dinner table!

An important moment (I always enjoy it) was when Donna shared her document of the story with edits. Students are always surprised to see that “real” authors revise. It’s such a valuable lesson to help kids think about their own writing work.

Donna also shared the first page of her upcoming middle school book, A Jar Full of Butterflies, a story about two sisters who have to move from Mexico to Texas and must find themselves here in America. This is a story many of our children know well from personal experience.

She encouraged our kids to find something they care about and work through their challenges. What a great message!

Happy Teaching!

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Bright Idea: Creative Writing Response for Any Book

It's another Bright Ideas Link-Up! I'm so excited to participate in one of the best link-ups I've seen. Teachers share great ideas from their classrooms, and not a product in sight. Just lots of super ideas for the classroom! 

My post today is a simple strategy to help students respond to any text, whether it's a poem, a story, or even informational text. We used it last year to respond to this book: A Perfect Season for Dreaming by Ben Saenz. 

The beauty of this strategy is how accessible it makes writing to kids with limited vocabularies. Here are the steps:

1. Set your purpose for reading: to notice and record interesting words. As you read the book aloud to the students, record the interesting words they enjoy on index cards. Each group of students can create their own set of index cards, if you'd like, or you can make a class set. 

2. Sort the words. To help students understand their new words and their usage, sort them into different groups. We sorted into different parts of speech: verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs.

And then we sorted into different tone words: positive and negative. 

4. Use the words to create a poem. Students can use the words on the cards to create lines in their poem. They can also add words to help their poems make sense.

This was the poem that we made out of these cards:

Summer arrives, bursting into flame.

Colors escaping from every bloom.

The cloudless sky

is shot with yellow sun.

How easy is that?! And yet, the kids really took off and shared some beautiful writing! One of our third grade teachers had students use the words to write about a special relationship they shared with someone else, because the book, A Perfect Season for Dreaming, describes the relationship between the grandfather and the granddaughter. Through using these words, students were able to describe their relationships beautifully and with complex language. 

I hope you try it! If you do, I'd love to see pictures! If you enjoyed this post, follow me on Facebook, Instagram, or TPT! For more bright ideas from more than 100 different bloggers, please browse through the link-up below and choose a grade or topic that interests you! Thanks for visiting the Bright Ideas Link-Up!

An InLinkz Link-up

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Schoolwide Writing Contest: The Best Part of Me

Last year, we hosted our first school-wide writing contest. The prompt was something my principal found that could be accommodated to suit writers of all levels: The Best Part of Me.  This prompt is general, yet personal. Students can share as much of their souls as they choose, so it made a beautiful end-of-year writing piece, but I could see it serving well at the beginning of the year, too, to help you "get to know" your kids, and to help them see each other as real people. And because you would model, model, model, they would get to know you, too! I recommend reading at least two books to help activate language and ideas. A couple of the books I pulled out and put into a basket for our teachers were:

And this one, although I haven't read it, looks like it would serve really well!

As you read and activate language and ideas, chart them out! These are a couple sample charts.

This is a sample I provided my teachers with: During a class conversation, chart out the different body parts and the reason that part is the best part of you! 

One of my teachers built this chart with her kids to help them think of options. 

And if you're ever stuck for inspiration, PIN! These are some of the great pins that helped our teachers think about helping students write in response to this prompt:

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Each teacher selected one piece to represent their class. I am not sure how they did this. I only had to choose between five or six for each grade level and it was excrutiating. How they chose between twenty or so kids is pretty impressive.

I mean, I know they used a rubric. I just think it's hard.

From there, we chose a grade level winner. This posed another challenge. I am working on it, but I am not yet a fluent Spanish speaker or reader, as many (over half) of our students are. Kids in grades K-4 wrote their pieces in Spanish if they were in a bilingual classroom setting. I had to call in for (bilingual) reinforcements to help me judge the pieces to make sure everybody had a fair shot!

Each grade level winner received a "First Place Winner" certificate and each class winner received a "Distinguished Writer Award". 

This piece, albeit short and simple, was especially moving. The student who wrote this piece is not used to winning much of anything, really, and his smile stretched from ear to ear when he went up to receive his certificate. 

Here's an adorable display that one of our teachers created out of their students' work!

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