Creating Analogies (Part 2): The Giver and Milkweed

From my analogy lesson with The Giver, I learned that I added a bit too much for my academic students to understand and left out a piece that is necessary for my understanding of student work. As I worked through my classes, I was having to modify the lesson. For my Pre-AP class analogy lesson with Milkweed, I have made some adjustments. 

The iceberg is gone in the Pre-AP lesson. My academic students were struggling enough with creating the analogies. Trying to make the animal analogies fit the iceberg was one step too much for them. With my co-teach class (academic and special education students), I never even introduced the iceberg. With another class, I had the students create the analogies, then determine where they would fit on the iceberg. Since we did the lesson as a workshop, I simply had them explain this element to me to see if they were grasping the idea. 

I have added an explanation piece to the Pre-AP lesson. As my academic students were showing me their analogies, I found myself repeatedly asking, "What do you mean by this? What is the connection?" Sometimes I forget that their thinking is not always going to be clear in their writing. I needed this extra step with them in order to not be guessing at their thinking. Every now and then they surprise me with a thought that I would never assume they had without the explanation of it. 

My academic classes only read the first five chapters of The Giver, while my Pre-AP students have read all of Milkweed. I am not sure that there was really enough information about Jonas in the first five chapters to get the analogy work that I wanted. For Pre-AP, however, they have a wealth of information to work with. Because of this, I have added two analogies that they must create: cockroach and milkweed. The cockroach image shows up repeatedly in the novel, and I want my students to put some thought into why. Milkweed is only mentioned a couple of times, but since it is the title of the novel, there must be a reason for it. I want to see what their thoughts about this are, as well. 

We will see how the revised lesson goes. Samples to come. 

The Giver 3-5: Creating Analogies

My next lesson for The Giver is ready, and it is going to make some brains in my classroom explode. This lesson has been pieced together from two sources:  I have used Kelly Gallagher's iceberg metaphor strategy from Deeper Reading and the Synectic Analogous Thinking lesson from AVID's The Write Path -  English Language Arts: Exploring Texts with Strategic Reading. Both lessons require students to write comparisons to show attributes of a character through metaphorical thinking. I have used both lessons separately in previous years and finally figured out that they essentially are the same thing.

Students will need to create three analogies. The steps in the lesson are designed to explicitly teach what I am expecting the students to do, and I will have them create the first analogy step-by-step with me. 

Two analogies will show the visible characteristics of Jonas (the top of the iceberg). The third will represent Jonas's hidden side (below the surface). I am only having them do one of these for now because I have a feeling that this part will be very difficult for them, especially so early in the story. Advanced students will have to create two, but I like to keep that part a secret until I actually tell them. 

The lesson also reinforces the use of text evidence. The kids are usually pretty good at finding the information from the text that they want to use, but this year in particular, we are struggling with how to correctly punctuate and site the information from the book. This gives me yet another opportunity to reteach this skill. 

I love this lesson and am likely to extend it to my Milkweed assignments with Pre-AP. I will be sure to share samples on this one.