The Illustrated Page: Medieval Manuscripts to New Media

Strategies

We follow Sobrato Early Academic Language, SEAL, “a comprehensive model of intensive, enriched language and literacy education designed for English language learners, starting in preschool and continuing through third grade.”³² Dr. Laurie Olsen, “a national expert in English language learner education,”³³ pioneered this model with the goal of having students be English proficient by third grade. English language development is integrated in science and social studies units, and the focus is on the use of powerful and complex language by the teachers while teaching these subjects. Our curriculum for English Language Arts is usually incorporated with science and/or social studies using the SEAL strategies. For this reason, this unit will also be integrated through social studies, with the California Native American and Local history.

I employ a number of cooperative and group learning strategies in my class, to promote social skills and communication among my students. According to researchers like Slavin, Cooperative learning has improved student achievement, race relations, and in turn students’ self-esteem.³⁴

Think-Pair-Share

Think-Pair-Share is a commonly used cooperative learning strategy developed by Frank Lyman.³⁵ This strategy is used across all grade levels and schools. It has three stages to develop higher-order thinking. In the first stage, Think – the teacher encourages students to think about a given prompt, a guiding question, or an inquiry question for a few seconds. At this time, the teacher can also model thinking aloud to show what a thought process involves. In the second stage, Pair – they pair up with a partner and talk about their thoughts with each other. This partner sharing is helpful to reduce anxiety for the students before sharing with the class, and it also provides an opportunity to them to formulate their ideas in sentences. In the third stage, Share – they share their ideas with the whole class. I will be using this strategy throughout this unit.

Collaborative Conversation

Collaborative Conversation is a SEAL strategy designed to help students communicate with each other in a safe environment. Students talk with partners or in a group in a meaningful way, one that is relevant to the topic and practice the use of academic language.

As they are guided into higher-level thinking, they learn to use respectful language such as “excuse me,” “I agree with you,” “I disagree with you, because…” or “in my opinion,” as well as using respectful body language while interacting with others, such as maintaining eye contact while actively listening to a person and nodding your head to agree or disagree while listening.

Observation Pictures

This is another SEAL strategy, similar to the K-W-L strategy, in which the students record what they know (K), what they want to know (W) and after they are done with the unit, they write what do they want to learn (L). In Observation Pictures strategy, pictures related to the context are placed on a construction paper around the classroom. Students work with partners as they move from one picture to another recording their observations on a post-it note and pasting it on the picture. This serves as an inquiry before starting the unit.

For this unit, instead of pasting the pictures around the classroom, I will project the images and art including the performance art from the various Native American cultures. Students will work with partners or in their group as they see each image of visual and performance art, they will record their observations on the post-it provided to them.

Numbered Heads Together

In this cooperative learning strategy,³⁶ students work in groups. Each student is assigned a number from one to the highest number in the group. In my class, I have students in groups of four, and I assign each student a number from one to four. The idea is for the students to work together by putting their “heads together” to come up with the solution to a guiding question.

Then I randomly select a Popsicle stick from four Popsicle sticks, which are numbered from one to four as well. The student who has the same number as that Popsicle stick is assigned the role of  “spokesperson” for his or her team. The goal is for each member of the group to contribute his or her ideas, and the spokesperson records those ideas and presents them to the whole class, ensuring equity of voice.

Frontloading Vocabulary

To help my English Learners, I usually frontload the challenging vocabulary before starting a lesson. I usually bring pictures and/or real objects that match the vocabulary word in the context of the story. Students have an opportunity to use the new vocabulary words in various settings through different subject areas and centers throughout the day as they internalize the new words. This strategy can be used to either integrate English Language Development or in small groups during the designated English Language Development time. English Language Development or ELD is a structured program designed to develop English language proficiency among English Language learners. These strategies can be either integrated through a concept or can be taught separately at a designated time.

Sentence Frames

Sentence frames are provided to the students, especially the English Language Learners, to help them frame their sentences to help their conversations flow. These sentence frames are differentiated in three levels to support the students’ learning such as: “Coyote wanted the song because ______________;” “Coyote decides _______________________, because_______________;” “The reason Coyote _________________________________.”

These sentence frames are used to guide students’ thought process while they are working individually or in groups.

Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers reinforce the background knowledge of the students, and they also help them visualize the information and internalize it. They help the students brainstorm new ideas before writing. Our school uses the graphic organizers developed by the company called, Thinking Maps.³⁷ These graphic organizers follow a consistent pattern and a protocol for use and are color coded for ease of distinction of different ideas. Each Thinking Map serves a different purpose. There are eight Organizers, and the students will use them for sequencing story events, describing, comparing and contrasting, finding cause and effect of situations.

Freytag’s Pyramid³⁸

I use this model while teaching my students about the plot of a story. This model is useful because it visually shows them the beginning, middle, and end of a story. As the reader goes up the side of the pyramid, they can visually see the rising action in the plot and a need to solve a problem in the story.

Dramatization/Role play

Bringing a story to life resonates with every child in the form of pretend play and dress–up. Dramatization engages students in reading, providing them with a better understanding of “point of view” and “voice” as they take up the characters’ expression. In an English learner class, it becomes most pertinent for the students to hear their voice and their language. These stories provide the students an opportunity to play with the language. This also lends a play-like quality to reading the graphic narrative. Not only does the juxtaposition of images and text in a graphic novel gives it a character of play, as if the story is moving in both time and space; also these folktales were mostly performed orally. This play-like structure becomes a great tool for students, especially English Language learners to own the story as they act it out. The students are provided with props that they might need during the performance. This way, the students will be able to bring both the performance part of the folktale, as well as the graphic narrative concept of the stories together.

As they become a part of the dramatis personae, students get a glimpse into the characters’ traits and their personalities, their perspectives and decisions through the use of intonation and inflection, students relate better with the character and enables a deeper understanding of the plot. This also helps the students infer events that might not be explicitly stated in the text. Student performances will be recorded to assess as well as showcase their learning to their parents when they visit for Open House or to see their child’s work

Close Reading

Close reading is defined as “a focused rereading of a text in which you go beyond a basic understanding of the text. It may involve a passage or key quotation from a text.”³⁹ I. A. Richards, an English poet, critic and teacher, invented this strategy as a new way of reading poetry, though currently schools and teachers use this strategy to comprehend any text, prose or poetry. This method also paved way for New Criticism. Close reading helps us make “mindful interactions with the text, [that allow us to] create new concepts or internalize new information.”⁴⁰

In this strategy the students read a text at least three times. The first reading is on-the-surface reading that sets the purpose of reading and develops background knowledge depending on explicit information. In the second reading students read a complex portion of the text, focusing on the author’s craft and text structure. The third reading takes the students deeper, requiring them to analyze and synthesize information.

Graphic narrative, on the other hand, is a juxtaposition of image and text. Close reading a graphic text would include reading the images first, then reading the text, and finally reading the image and text together. This will help students make inferences. Inference is an important tool for problem solving and critical thinking. As Duffy has noted, “Inference is said to be the engine of comprehension.”⁴¹ Close reading strategy provides tools to readers, such as inference, to dig deeper into a text or an image.