Happy Fourth of July!

I hope you are out celebrating our beautiful country with friends and family.  In honor of our nation's birthday, I have a wonderful resource for you, "Today in History" from the American Memory Collection of the Library of Congress. 

Today's entry is hopefully pretty obvi... buuutttttt add it to your bookmark list for great primary source documents throughout the year.

 

 

 

God bless the USA!

Historical Perspectives, pt 1

This past Tuesday I met with the teachers in the online class I have been coteaching this summer for the Ohio Writing Project: Historical Perspectives.  We have been reading one of my favorite texts, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  TGLAPPPS is set in post WWII England and consists of letters between characters in London and a book club in the English Channel.

It has some majorly endearing characters and is a charming historical fiction work.  It's lovely and compelling and has been perfect for our class. 

As part of our time together yesterday, SATP (Summer Awesome Teaching Partner, of course) shared a text set that we created as a companion to TGLAPPPS.

What is a text set you ask?  Well, here are three quotes from the experts that may help you shape your own definition.

● A collection of ... texts that have some connection to one another. "Text" can be defined as
a book, an article, a poem, a movie ... The connections are the reader's and are connected to
personal response.... Any classification that expresses a commonality of ideas or authorship or
time or curricular issue would be the basis of a text set [The Reading Teacher]
 
● Collections of resources from different genre, media, and levels of reading difficulty...to
support learners with a range of experiences and interests more than any single text. They are
particularly supportive of less-experienced readers [NCTE leader, Laura Robb]
 
● The idea is centered around the standards and the requirements of argument, perspective, and
multiple texts [Ohio Writing Project Asst. Director, Beth Rimer]

Basically, a text set is what lots of smart teachers have been doing for years to help students connect literature to all sorts of genres in order to think more deeply about a text/era/theme.

SATP shared our Guernsey text set.  It's yours to browse here if you're interested in seeing an example or you perhaps teach WWII. Among other materials, it includes an interview with one of the authors, Annie Barrow, and several primary source images.

We also wrapped up our book club discussion on TGLAPPS.  But that's not all!  I'll share next week about our Skype session with author Lynne Dorfman.

Martin's Big Words

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr, Day!

To celebrate this amazing man, ATP and I created a lesson integrating primary sources and the text Martin's Big Words.

We started with reading the book My Brother Martin by Christine King Farris.  This sweet book details MLK's childhood and tells about a time white friends in his neighborhood suddenly decided not to play with him.

Then we shared images from The Library of Congress.  We also shared a shortened clip of the "I Have a Dream Speech."  Students had a copy of the text to follow along with and added their own thinking and questions as we watched.

 

After discussion, we read Martin's Big Words.  The students each selected one quote from the book to analyze and reflect on.  [By the way, if you want to hear the text of the book, check out this video. The quality isn't great, but it is the full text and images.]

 

These reflections will become part of a display in our wing with a timeline of important African American figures.  It's a great way to talk not only about this time period, but how we can continue living out the 'big words' of MLK.

I really enjoyed teaching this powerful lesson on a important topic.  What are you doing to keep the dream alive?