We are midway through the unit collaboration project and I am feeling better about the progress we are making now then I was at the pre-planning stage. Stacey and I have established we will be creating a unit focusing on historical fiction. We have chosen the book Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor to focus the unit around. Stacey will be creating a lesson around what historical fiction is and what the characteristics of historical fiction are. She also had the idea of a lesson dealing with the timeline of the civil rights movement that starts from the Civil War and goes up to 1968.
One of the lessons I will be focusing on in the media center is with comparing/contrasting Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglass. The students will work in groups and specific books will be introduced that discuss each of these prominent figures. Another lesson I was thinking of for the media center is centered around students interviewing their families. It would be a way to show the relationship between history and personal experiences and how each family's experience is different and how it has shaped them. They would all focus on one particular event in history and ask questions such as why was the event important, how did people feel about it, how did it affect you and your life, and what was happening in our family at the time? This would engage students from historically underrepresented groups. They could discover how a major historical event shaped their family and others from their background. Students could choose from a variety of ways to present their finding whether it is by video, PowerPoint presentation, etc. They would then see how their family's experience was different from their classmates.
With having the role of the media specialist, I have been looking for sources that would have enrichment activities for the unit being created. For instance the idea of interviewing a family member came from National Endowment for the Humanities EDSITEment website. There is also a WebQuest that was created for this book by a teacher in Michigan which would be a great tool to incorporate in this unit. Basically, I have been looking for ways to add to the main lessons that would be taught in a unit such as this and what would enhance them and the information being taught.
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Kirsten,
ReplyDeleteThere's so much you could do with this lesson to incorporate the learning styles, cultural backgrounds, and information literacy needs of students. Here are a couple of suggestions:
1. Pick some not-so-safe,or not-so-well known, historical figures to study the Civil Rights Era. There were students, parents, everyday citizens (both Black and White) who were active in the movement and bringing their stories to light may help students get a better sense of how racial inequalities affected all individuals at that time. In addition, a better comparative analysis might be MLK Jr. and Malcolm X since they were contemporaries and had different views about how to achieve social justice, particularly for disenfranchised African Americans. There was a play at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History called The Meeting. It was about a hypothetical meeting between Malcolm and Martin. These kinds of resources would be nice to expose students to so you go beyond a typical history report and get students to see the nuances of these figures life and thought.
2. Determine a way to assess what students know before the unit as far as the content and the information seeking process. That way, you can have concrete evidence to suggest the impact you will have on student learning as the school librarian. Some suggestions might be a KWL chart, a empty outline, a quick-write, a survey, etc.
I will be looking at the assessment piece in particular as I grade the unit.