Giving purpose and context to our students always helps with engagement and for them to connect their learning. While we are focusing in Literary Non Fiction genre, and reading about Dr. Martin Luther King, we launched the African American History Biography Project. Students were to choose an African American writer or poet to research and present at the school's Living Museum.
Since we are still struggling with summarization, we decided to focus in a discussion activity to rate the important events in My Brother Martin text. After students read the story, they were given six events and had to rate them in order of importance with a partner. Once students finished, we had a whole class discussion about their ideas. They had to justify their ratings. Interestingly, all groups agreed in the non important and somewhat important, but there were discrepancies in the last two events. The discussion was rich, and it was a great chance to use our conversation stems. Again, this kind of activities is especially important for my bilingual students to practice their oral competency.
Other important aspect of analyzing a literary non fiction text is focusing in the character traits, to tackle this skill students did a character trait match with text evidence. Some students needed support because the vocabulary was beyond their comprehension, and although it gave us a good chance to use context clues and dictionary skills may be next time we could choose more familiar words.
With this experiences in hand, students started their research and gather information over the next two weeks. They had graphic organizers to guide them, and a template to make a slideshow for their character. They also had the option to do a poster. Some students needed some support but all were able to complete their research and presentation.
