Professional Documents
Culture Documents
class. My class is rather diverse. Although it is located in Glastonbury, CT, the Social
Economic Status is lower in my school than in any of the other elementary school
located in Glastonbury. I tried a few different things with my class and was very happy
First, I wanted to see how students would do with choosing to read their own
giving the children a Fountas and Pinnell reading level range that they had to choose a
book within. I was rather happy with this and thought that the class all got to choose
books that were good for them to read. I felt the books were more interesting to them
because they got to choose! Over a two week period, I conferenced with my children
every week and kept notes on how much the students were enjoying and understanding
in their books. Every day I would do a read aloud from a Historical Fiction picture book
and would use the book for my mini lesson. I would then have students complete an
assignment using their own Historical Fiction book that related to the mini lesson. For
example, students had to identify one day which character held the power in the story,
After this two week period, I decided to spend a month on Historical Fiction book
clubs with my students. My teacher and I placed students into homogenous groups
based on reading level. Each group received a book that matched their reading levels
that my teacher and I picked out. We tried to think about who was in each group and
outlined some of the things we had learned in the last two weeks as well as added new
topics. The first day of book club I had each group meet and establish a set of goals and
rules for their club. Then, each student signed the bottom of the rules and goals. This
page was the first page of their book club packet. I then allowed the clubs to break up
their reading into eight sections. This way, when the book club would meet on
Wednesday and on Friday, everyone in the group would have read up to the same point
in the book. For the most part, this worked out well. The second day, I sent my students
links to different articles about the historical parts as well as geographical parts of their
books that were important to research and understand before jumping into the books.
This was helpful to fall back on when some of the books’ more challenging dynamics
Each week, the assignments in the packet had four main tasks that needed to be
completed by Friday of that week. I compiled a list of different “sticky notes” that
students could choose a set number of to be completed each week. For example, some
specific instructions for each sticky note, as well as sentence frames for some. The
second main section after the sticky notes was a timeline event page. I had students fill
out one or two timeline events which included a title, the chapter the event took place
and three supporting details about the event. Then, I had two other main sections that
varied from week to week. These last two sections were bigger assignments. For
example, one week I had students write a paragraph in the first person, as if they were
a particular character in their book and their thoughts, feelings and experiences at the
time. They then had to write a second paragraph explaining why they thought, felt or
experienced what they did by giving supporting evidence from the text. Along with that
assignment, the students had to determine one of the themes from their Historical
Fiction text and use supporting evidence from the text to explain how it was a theme, as
Each week students collaborated with one another and we discussed how to use
different talk moves during book club to facilitate a more natural, inclusive discussion.
Students at the end of each week did a self-assessment of their written work as well as
their participation and performance in book club. Each week I then gave them my own
Finally, the culminating assignment in the packet was to interview an adult that is
at least 20 years old. The purpose of this assignment was to have students see real
world examples of how time period affects the experiences that people have. We spent
a day sharing our interviews and comparing and contrasting them to our own lives and
in pairs, as an entire group) with their book clubs to create and I-movie book trailer
selling their book. This was basically like an electronic book talk. We spent an entire
week making our scripts, choosing pictures, sounds, videos, recording voicing and
writing words into the trailer. I showed examples and non-examples online of book
trailers other students have made. I gave time to switch trailers with another group and
to chat about what was strong and what could be stronger in each. We celebrated and
Finally, I had my students prepare a script to book talk the book that they read for
this project and had them share this and their I-movies during a Books and Bagels
event that I held this week at school for parents and students. Everyone loved the I-
movies as well as their book talks! I gave the students time to rehearse these before
parents came in to see and they really hit it out of the park! I was so impressed with
them. Overall, I loved the flow of this unit. In the future, I would like to try the book clubs
idea withal different independent reading books that are on the same topics and just
have open ended questions that directed at the theme of the book or topic.