I am participating in Day 10 of the Slice of Life Writing Challenge. Check out the bloggers who are also participating in this challenge at
twowritingteachers.wordpress.com.
At the NCTIES conference last week, I presented a variety of K-5 Digital projects. One of the apps that I shared was the Venn Diagram app by ReadWriteThink.org. Today I demonstrated how to compare and contrast two books using the web based version of the app with my fourth grade students in the computer lab. I was pleased in students’ comparisons of two books which shared the theme of migration. One book was called “This Is The Rope” by Jacqueline Woodson. The other book was “The Blessing Cup” by Patricia Polacco. Both of these books deal with the theme of segregation and involve a special object. They are amazing stories which I had shared during previous lessons in the lab. My students saved their Venn Diagrams and emailed copies to themselves using their Gaggle email addresses. I am hoping that in the near future, they will be able to share the Venn Diagrams from their email onto their Gaggle blogs and comment on each others’ similarities and differences.
Read an excerpt from “The Blessing Cup” published in 2013:
Interview with Patricia Polacco:
Summary of “This is the Rope”:
Summary of “This is the Rope”:
My Common Core Objective to support my lesson is as follows:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.9
Compare and contrast the treatment of similar themes and topics and patterns of events in stories, myths, and traditional literature from different cultures.
I have met Patricia Polacco and James Ransome, the illustrator of “This is the Rope” and cherish my autographed copies of their books such as “The Keeping Quilt” by Polacco and James Ransome’s beautifully illustrated “Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt”. It is interesting to me that I could just have easily have had my students compared their two Quilt books! Maybe I’ll do that too!
I really enjoy going to ReadWriteThink’s website and finding lesson resources for books. Here’s a link to a Problem/Solution lesson using “Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt” as an example to show you the quality of their resources in addition to the interactive Venn Diagram at their website:
I am sharing below some of the pictures that I took of my students’ computers as they built their Venn diagrams. I was pleased that students thought deeply about the similar themes that both books have a special object that is passed down, that both families leave their state our country of origin due to unjust treatment, that the time in which the books are set is similar, and that each of the families who migrated thrived in their new home.
Teaching STREAM 