Classroom Activities
Comparing March to Good Trouble: John Lewis
As students read March, the class will watch clips of Good Trouble: John Lewis. Students will compare transcripts of the film to the text of the graphic novel. Students will analyze the techniques of the different media formats and how they support the ideas within the narrative.
Vocabulary Activities
Graphic novels provide many benefits to building student vocabulary. March’s use of imagery helps reinforce basic and subject-related vocabulary. The repetition of words throughout a story and within its context aids comprehension.
Beyond reading, students need to spend time interacting with vocabulary. Students can utilize a graphic organizer like a Frayer Model to record definitions, cite examples, describe characteristics, or create images to associate with a term. Creating their own examples, images, and sentences for terms like “integrate” and “segregate” encourages incorporation in students’ vocabularies. Virtual programs like Gimkit create interactive vocabulary games for whole class engagement.
Language Dive
Language dives develop understanding of sentence structure, grammar, and vocabulary through deconstructing and analyzing language in a single sentence. Students study the structure then practice and transfer the concepts within it. The sentence does not have to be overly complex to focus on specific concepts.
For example, students could analyze the following sentence from March: “Violence does beget violence, but the opposite is just as true.”59 The class could discuss the use of “but” verses “and” to build their understanding of conjunctions. Context clues could be applied to words like “beget” to glean meaning. After deconstructing the sentence, the students practice writing their own sentences using some of the academic vocabulary, sentence structure, or grammatical concepts found in the original sentence.
Comments: