Classroom Activities
There are several writing activities in this unit that require students to compile information, analyze their purpose in writing, and to create authentic written products. Students will read and respond to literature, reflecting on their own experiences as a Latino immigrant or child of immigrants. The culminating activity will be to produce and orally present a third person memoir based on an oral history, and a collection of information, photographs, maps and images to reflect the immigration experience of a family member or close acquaintance. This unit will be best suited for the spring when students can apply their language skills and their critical and analytical skills.
Poetry in the Classroom
I visualize the use of poetry as the fountain from which students' ideas, values and understanding spill out. I am excited at the potential that through the reading of poetry related to the immigrant experience, students will look at their reflections in the pool of thought to discover their personal identities and sense of place.
My teaching goals in this five day lesson plan are: 1) to model what a good reader does, such as think aloud, clarify, make connections, identify important words and topic/themes, etc.; 2) to provide support to English Language Learners by modeling reading and writing, provide opportunities for language/vocabulary development, the use of graphic organizers, scaffold lesson objectives, etc.; 3) to present opportunities for literary, personal and home-school connections; and 4) to integrate social studies curriculum and technology.
Student learning goals are: 1) to read the poetry and make connections to self and the world; 2) to identify and write parts of speech and grammar correctly; 3) to reflect on the meaning of the poem and create their own, using the poem as a model; 4) to work cooperatively, and 5) actively participate and orally present their rendered poems. These learning goals meet New Mexico language arts standards and benchmarks for fifth grade (Appendix A).
The poem I have selected is "University Avenue" by Pat Mora(12). I have organized several reading and writing classroom activities to develop the ethnic identity and college-going identity. This approach enables students to view and reflect on literature in multiple ways, considering how poetry can connect to their lives and experiences.
Day One: Focus activity
As a way to engage students and set the stage for the poem, I will show a short film clip from "Escuela" (found on chapter 4 of "New Faces: Latinos in North Carolina"). In this film clip, Liliana Luis, a young nine-year old daughter of a migrant worker family living in California talks about going to high school. After viewing this film clip, discuss with students if they think Liliana will go to college. Why or why not?
Think-Pair-Share: To begin the activity, direct students to think about a quick response to the following open-ended question, "What do you know about college?" Preface this question by indicating that they will create a word web graphic organizer with the word "college" in the center of the web. Students have three to five minutes to come-up with as many one-word associations they have with college and write them on a piece of paper. After creating their word web, students share one of their associations with a partner and explain why they wrote that word. Once each person has shared what they wrote with the other, students have the opportunity to share with the class one of the associations they discussed.
Interactive Writing: As one student in the pair orally presents one of their associations with the class, the other student will write the one-word association in the word web that is drawn on large chart paper and posted in front of the class. Once each pair has contributed to the word web, the students check for correct spelling, grammar, etc.
Next, I will initiate a class discussion on the topic of college. The purpose of this activity is to encourage the students to explore the relationship they have with the topic and to encourage them to orally present their ideas to the class. These activities on this first day will also provide an excellent opportunity to observe students' ideas, values and preconceptions related to topic of attending college.
Day Two: Reading
The poem, "University Avenue" places Latinos in a university setting. This fulfills one of the goals to offer students opportunities to develop a college-going identity. The next two days emphasize the development of ethnic and college-going identities.
Shared Reading: Project the poem on an overhead and read the poem together. Ask students to identify important words and discuss any vocabulary they may not understand. Class discussion: Initiate a discussion after reading the poem. Ask students to identify the subject of the poem. The poem joins the reader and the university student by using "We/ Our people" as the subject of the poem. Essentially, the reader (student) and the university student are united by the experience of going to college and their common heritage/ ancestors. Next, I will direct students to reread the first two lines of the poem, "We are the first/ of our people to walk this path." and last two lines of the poem, "We do not travel alone./ Our people burn deep within us," This could be the backdrop for a class discussion on how we are still connected to our heritage, language, traditions and culture even though we move from one place to another, into unfamiliar places. Immigrants or children of immigrants should be able to relate to this. Finally, I will ask students to identify what was given by the ancestors in the poem. Possible answers are found in the text and italicized in Spanish: gifts from the land; fire, herbs, and song; Yerbabuena (Spearmint); rhythms (music); abrazos (embraces, hugs); cuentos en Español (stories in Spanish). I would ask the students from where these "gifts" come. Possible answers could be traditions, cultural beliefs/ customs, and the Spanish language.
School-home connection: As a homework assignment, students will be asked to talk to their parents and reflect on what their ancestors have given them and their family, as they now live in a place away from where their ancestors lived.
Day Four: Reflection
The following day will offer students a time to reflect and internalize what it would mean to them to go to college. To provide a model of what the students will be asked to write, I will pass around my graduation cap and tassel. I will also show a photograph taken of me when I graduated from college, and ask them if they know where I am and what is happening in the picture. After they discover where, when and what the event was, I will tell them how I felt so much pride and how thankful I was that my family and grandparents were there to see me graduate.
Modeling of Writing Activity: To transition them to the writing activity, I will read/ model my written response to the following question [written on the board]: What did your people (ancestors) give you so that you were successful and graduated from college? My written and verbal response will begin with "Our people prepared us/ with. . . a second language, pride, and family stories." Then I will read the last two lines of Mora's poem that will conclude their poem and is written on the board.
Independent Writing: Students will receive an activity sheet. Students will react to the issue of being the first in their family to go to college. Students will respond to the writing prompt on the top of the activity sheet: Imagine yourself in college and you are the first person in your family to go to college. What did your people (ancestors) give you so that you were successful and graduated from college? Compose a poem using the middle two lines of the poem, "Our people prepare us/ with __________." The last two lines of Mora's poem that will conclude their poem. I will let the students know that they will orally present what they have written.
Day Five: Oral Presentation
Oral Presentation: Students will reread and self-evaluate what they have written using a writing rubric. Students will have time to practice saying aloud what they wrote with a partner and then sit in a circle. This will be the time that I will check what they have written and scaffold the lesson to assist the students who need help rewriting or reading aloud what they have written. Once students are ready and sitting in the circle, they will take turns reading their poem. After each student has read their two lines, as a chorus, we will read the last two lines of Mora's poem. This rendering of the original poem will affect meaning and purpose to the poem and theme.
Assessment: The assessment will be ongoing. Students will be evaluated on how well they follow directions (listening); their fluency in reading during shared reading and in their oral presentation (reading); their participation and cooperation during the Interactive Writing activity (speaking); and their level of reflection in their writing (writing).
Social Studies Extension: Discuss the Dream Act, which has been under consideration in government. Students could analyze data on how many Hispanics graduate from high school, college and graduate school (see UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center's 2006 report, "Falling through the Cracks: Critical Transitions in the Latina/o Educational Pipeline"). Students could evaluate how the Dream Act could potentially impact their immediate futures and provide opportunities for higher education. There are film clips on the "New Faces: Latinos in North Carolina" which can present this issue to students.
Oral History Project
My students will record and write their own first-person oral history project with a family member or close acquaintance who immigrated to the U.S. I will encourage them in the second week of the unit to begin to choose their subject for their oral history. As needed, I will work with the parents to help students to find a person to interview. The actual interviewing will be an out-of-class homework assignment. Students will follow the Writing Process to complete this project by the third week of the unit. The fourth week of this project will be used to orally present their oral histories to the class. Specific ideas for creating their oral histories will be discussed immediately following their presentations. Please note that this lesson plan of classroom activities is written more as an overview of what activities should take place over the course of several weeks.
Preparation: To facilitate the work of this project and others in the unit, I will send a letter to the parents prior to the execution of the unit to inform them of the project schedule and details for each. I will also request that they communicate and inform me of any concerns or questions throughout the nine weeks. It may be helpful to invite parents to an informational meeting before we begin the unit to present the schedule of activities and details, and to strengthen the partnership between the parents, students and I. To accommodate those students who are having difficulty completing the project, I will encourage them to work collaboratively with another student. Also, to accommodate my monolingual Spanish-speaking students, I will provide individual or small-group instruction during their independent writing time.
Week One
Shared Reading: Students will read various examples of oral history writing. There are examples of immigration oral histories online. The PBS website "The New Americans," has an oral history of an immigrant from Mexico. (13) Also, oral histories of Mexican immigrants are in Marilyn Davis' book Mexican Voices/American Dreams: An Oral History of Mexican Immigration to the United States. Class discussions: After shared reading, I will facilitate a discussion to anchor their understanding of the purpose of oral histories. Some leading questions I will ask: "How do you think the person who wrote this knew these details about this person's experience immigrating to the U.S.?" I will try to direct student responses to conclude that questions were asked. "What questions do you think they were asked?" I will list student responses on chart paper and review them in a later Interactive Writing activity when we are adapting questions for the interviews. "What is an oral history?" I may offer a simple definition: it is the personal story of a person's life. "Why are oral histories valuable to historians?" Oral histories pass on information and knowledge about a person's or group of people's experience - a record of history. Cultures have used them - oral tradition. I will follow this discussion by creating a KWL graphic organizer on oral histories on large chart paper.
Guided Reading: Students will read selections found in Newcomers in America: Stories of Today's Young Immigrants. This book provides voices of young immigrants through candid interviews and conversations based on their experiences adapting to a new life, culture, and language in the United States. Three of the people highlighted in the book, Enrique (Mexico), Carlos (Mexico) and Erika (Ecuador) are representatives of young immigrants from Latin America with whom Latino students could identify. Students will read the questions that are at the beginning of each chapter and read each young person's response. They will chart the characteristics of each person (what they like or dislike, their country of origin, how did they come to the U.S., etc.) after reading the passages. A graphic organizer will be utilized to identify and categorize what characteristics are similar and different among the three individuals. Students will write the characteristics that are different inside each of the three outlines of a person. The characteristics that are similar will be included inside an object like an umbrella, rainbow, cloud or flag drawn over the heads of the three people. In the second week, students will continue adding characteristics to create a profile of that person.
Independent Reading: Students will be invited to read oral histories. Following their reading of oral histories, students will write in their Reading Response Journals a brief description of the person they read (refer to Interactive Writing) and list the questions interviewers probably asked and what other questions they think would be helpful. This activity will continue in the second week.
Interactive Writing: Students will brainstorm and create a web of how they will find a person to interview (through their family, friends, neighbors, at church, etc.) I will indicate that they need to begin to find a person to interview (this may take several days). I will direct students (and provide a letter to parents) to write a brief paragraph about the person they will interview (should include name, where he or she is from, how long she or he has been in the United States, why the person came here, etc.). Also, during the first week, students will discuss and write in Interactive Writing what makes an oral history a "good" one (well written and interesting to read). I will challenge students to refer to the rubric to inform their discussions, and they will write their responses on chart paper. We will come back to this and add to our list as students continue reading oral histories. This list of things to think about will be useful as students are revising what they have written.
Second Week
Shared Reading: Students will read sample questions and select which questions will be useful to conduct the interviews. The PBS "The New Americans" website offers "Guiding Questions for Oral History Interview" which you can download and print for the students. Other excellent samples of questions are in Newcomers in America: Stories of Today's Young Immigrants. The questions that were given to each young person are provided at the beginning of each chapter. Chapter two focuses on "Coming to America." The questions are: Where are you originally from and how old were you when you came to America? What family members accompanied you on the journey? What do you remember about why you left and the preparations for leaving? How did you feel about coming to America? Where did you first arrive in the United States and how was it decided where you would live? To get the students thinking about writing an oral history, students could read the questions and answers that are included in "Oral History: Q&A Sample and Passage" on the PBS webpage. As a cooperative small group activity, students will work to organize responses to write an oral history. Later, they will read and compare theirs with what was written in the "Interview Transformed into an Oral History." Finally, students will read about best approaches and recommendations for conducting the interview. For example, what will they need to conduct the interview?
Directed Writing: As a pre-writing activity, students will begin working on developing interview questions and creating a list of questions. I will refer students to the list that was generated in the first week and continue to add to the list as you revisit this throughout the week in Interactive Writing In addition, as an Interactive Editing activity, I will facilitate the students to write an oral history based on a set of answers from questions. This will model how to take the responses in an interview and organize them to compose a "good" oral history. Also, students will revisit what was written for what makes a "good" oral history. Students will decide what are the essential elements and a writing rubric will be created. Mini lessons on quotation marks and note-taking will be presented to assist students with skills relevant to writing an oral history.
Independent Writing: Students will finalize their list of questions. If their interviewees speak only Spanish, the questions will need to be in Spanish.
Week Three
Independent Writing: Students will use this week to draft, revise, edit and publish. During this time they will share their drafts with their peers, who can provide constructive feedback and ask questions to clarify ideas. Direct instruction on writing in first-person voice and communicating the immigrant's story will be essential.
Independent Reading: Students will use this time to conduct research on their interviewee's homelands, birthplaces and collect background information relevant to the interviewee's stories. Have students reflect and add questions that come from this research in their Reading Response Logs.
Shared Reading: Students will share their oral histories throughout the week, at whatever stage they are in the writing process. After each reading, students will discuss their reactions and provide suggestions for improvement based on the rubric and chart on what makes a "good" oral history.
Week Four
Students will present their oral histories. Students will have a copy of the oral history to refer to (using an overhead projector) while they are being presented. Students will self- and peer-evaluate the oral histories and oral presentations using rubrics. After the presentations have been completed, students will evaluate their work overall. They could consider what they learned about immigration, what were the similarities or differences among the people who were interviewed, what were the challenges in doing this project, what did they learn about oral histories, etc. Students will complete the KWL chart on oral histories. In regards to the project, students can self-assess: Did you do your best? Did you work hard and feel good about what you completed? Did you finish your work on time? If you had to do it again, what would you do differently?
Assessment: Each student will write a brief thank you letter to the person they interviewed. The letter will detail what they have learned about immigration and how that relates to the interviewee's experience. I will also assess the oral histories using a scoring guide/ rubric. An excellent one is provided on the PBS "The New Americans" webpage.
Third Person Memoir Picture Book
Using the already written oral history, students will adapt it to create a memoir written in third-person. To complete this project in four weeks, students will compile their research; collect photographs, images and illustrations to create a memoir picture book of that person. Students will follow Writer's Workshop/ Writing Process to draft, revise, edit and publish their writing during Independent Writing. Students will orally present their memoirs the final week. Please note that this plan is written more as an overview of what activities should take place over the course of several weeks.
Through the creation of this project, each student will perform several learning goals that address state language arts, social studies, and visual arts standards and benchmarks (Appendix A). The criteria for illustration and narrative are: matches the text and tells a story (extends the text); sets the actions of the story in a clearly described time and place; presents the immigrant's story as the main character effectively; establishes a story line; develops the action of the main events of the story; focuses on important details; reveals an authentic artistic and cultural style; organizes story in an effective way; and makes thoughtful choices of medium to suit the mood and tone of the text (America's Choice, 5th Grade, Section V, Memoir Picture Book, p. 214).
As a focus activity, to initiate the project, I will read aloud to the students, "Memoir is how we try to make sense of who we are, who we once were, and what values and heritage shaped us,"(14) I will ask the students, based on what they already know - what kind of genre in literature is a memoir similar to (biography or autobiography). This will shape their thinking to understand how their memoir will resemble a biography but not of their subject's entire life but just that person's experience immigrating to the U.S. I will relate this discussion to the Text Sets Lesson (America's Choice, 5th Grade, Section V, Lesson 8, p. 203).Which text set or aspect of memoir writing will they produce?
I will use the book If Walls Could Speak/ Si las paredes hablaran by Celia Alvarez Muñoz as a model of the format for the memoir they will produce. This book presents the reader with two concurrent texts written in English and Spanish which run parallel to each other. The parallel texts frame several images, photographs, poems, drawings and sayings in the middle of each page. The engaging presentation/layout of the book is much like what you would see in a scrapbook. The running text at the bottom of the pages will be the story of immigrant, written in third-person. The running text at the top of the pages will be a short history of Latino immigration to the Unites States and Santa Fe.
Simultaneously with the creation of this project, I will incorporate visual references and timelines to strengthen the social studies lessons during Shared Reading. I have found In the Settling of North America valuable background information, maps, images and timelines on the Latin American migrations to Santa Fe, NM (local) and North America (national). In addition, students will read passages from The Immigrant Experience: The Mexican Americans by Julie Catalano, We Are Americans: Voices of the Immigrant Experience by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, and Destination America: The People and Cultures That Created a Nation. These shared reading experiences will support the writing of the historical account to be incorporated in the memoirs. As an extension, I will invite a local immigration advocacy group to talk to students and their parents on immigration issues that affect families in Santa Fe.
During Directed Writing, I plan to take students through the process of using an oral history as the basis for creating a memoir. The students and I will collaboratively distill what is essential in the sample oral history and transform it to a third person memoir. We will follow the Writer's Workshop/ Writing Process. This will take many sessions. When it comes time to revise the writing, I will focus on adding important and interesting details to the story (Lesson 10). This interactive writing piece will provide students a visual reference as they write their memoirs based on the oral histories they have written.
I will provide time for activity centers in which students can select, organize and design their memoirs (America's Choice, 5th Grade, Section V, Lessons 1-5 pp. 198-199). Students will be able to circulate to each center. The centers will be devoted to 1) poetry: select a portrait poem for the person; 2) oral history: adapt their oral history to a story. Students should consider what will make a "good" and interesting story; 3) Collaboration: Students will work in pairs to review the progress of their stories and give advice, using a rubric; 4) photography and art: Students will select and store copies of photographs, Chicano art and Mexican motifs to embellish the pages of their memoirs; and 5) maps: Students will create a migration map of the immigrant's journey, titled "From There to Here." The map "Enrique's Journey from Tegucigalpa to Nuevo Laredo" on pages iv - v of La travesía de Enrique by Sonia Nazario provides an excellent visual reference and example of what the students could do in theirs.
To assess the memoir, I will follow a writing rubric and project rubric. Students will also self- and peer-evaluate the memoirs and the oral presentations. Finally, students will self-assess their work quality and learning outcomes from this project.
Notes
1. Carlson, Lori Marie. Red Hot Salsa: Bilingual Poems Being Young and Latino in the United States, pp. 122-3. This poem is written in English and in Spanish.
2. Data taken from website http://santafe.areaconnect.com/ statistics.htm>
3. Ortiz, Vilma. "Language Background and Literacy among Hispanic Young Adults"
4. http://labloga.blogspot.com/2007/04/ living-to-tell-stor-authentic-latio_26.html>
5. Sheets, Rosa Hernández. Diversity Pedagogy, p. 14.
6. Ibid, pp. 53-59.
7. http://labloga.blogspot.com/2007/04/ living-to-tell-stor-authentic-latio_26.html>
8. Recommendation number 6 of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Report, p.5.
9. Sheets, Rosa Hernández. Diversity Pedagogy, definition found on p. 213.
10. Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, p. 426.
11. Ibid. p. 428.
12. Mora, Pat. My Own True Name, p. 23.
13. http://library.thinkquest.org/20619/ Present.html>.
14. Zinsser, William, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, p. 6.
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