Strategy 1: Establishing a Hook through the Interactive Read-Aloud
I will entitle the fundamental strategy to be used for the purpose of implementing this curriculum unit "The Hook." The hook will be my way of cultivating interest in The Color Purple, through literature first. My thrust to establish a positive correlation between the fictive protagonist Celie and Fantasia will have to reverse chronology and begin with the life of Fantasia. This will be the hook because Fantasia is a pop-culture icon they know, love, and would be interested in learning more about. I will establish this hook through a literacy strategy entitled the Read-Aloud. The Read Aloud entails five essential components: The teacher reads a piece of literature to students. The teacher then models their thinking to illustrate effective examples of a self-directed process by which one can better comprehend the literature. The teacher then directs questions or an opportunity to share their thinking to the students. The students respond to each other in groups of two or more. The students finally produce an authentic product, which requires them to share their thinking with textual evidence corroborating their thoughts. This will be coupled with a reciprocated Think Aloud that reflects their ability to conquer the process of deconstructing the literature through asking the right questions, and conducting effective investigations to draw sound, text-based conclusions.
The first component of the Read Aloud simply entails the teacher reading a piece of literature to their students. The purpose of this component is to model fluent and prosodic reading for students. Fluent reading simply means to read with rhythm and phrasing that very much mirrors that of a conversation. Prosody is expressive, passionate reading. The marriage of fluency and prosody in reading classifies it as "good reading." In a day and age where children do not even come to school knowing nursery rhymes, which should be a child's foundational introduction to speaking with fluency and prosody, the Read Aloud is essential. No matter the age or grade of a student, it is my personal conviction that there should always be time allocated in the classroom for tve he Read-Aloud. We cannot expect our children to be fluent prosodic readers without tangible models of what it looks and sounds like.
I will conduct a Read Aloud of several pages of Fantasia's autobiography, Life is Not a Fairy Tale in tandem with selected passages in Alice Walker's The Color Purple (selected carefully for censorship purposes). I will read these works aloud concurrently for the purpose of having them ultimately waging comparisons between the main protagonists in each book. The second component of the Read-Aloud is the Think-Aloud, the process of modeling and sharing one's thinking.
A think-aloud entails modeling thinking to illustrate effective examples of a self-directed process by which one can better comprehend the literature. As a Performance Studies educator with literature as a foundation, I find the Read Aloud essential, because it is a demonstrative strategy, and requires a high performance element.
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