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. 

The Giver: Chapter 2

Two day weeks are so hard to plan for, but I got this! I'm a supah stah!

After taking baby steps through chapter one of The Giver, I set my kids up for independent work with chapter 2. We began by setting up a Tree Map (Thinking Map). I am a Thinking Maps trainer for my school, but with so many useful strategies out there, I often forget to use these. This is the first one I incorporated this year. 

I established the purpose - to classify and define the rituals associated with different age groups in the community. Although more ages are mentioned in the chapter, I only focused on three (1, 9, 12). For age eight, we connected back to the reference to animals in chapter 1 and did a mini-lesson on inference. 

Once they read through the chapter and identified the rituals for the ages, my students had to summarize the information in writing, plus add a text-to-self response: What are your thoughts about receiving a lifelong job at age 12? Since my students are 13 and 14, this freaked them out pretty fast. 

This was not a complex lesson, but it was enough for a short week before a holiday. 

Identifying Contrasts & Contradictions in The Giver (Chapter 1)

Before beginning The Giver, I explained to my students that we would be going through the first chapter slowly, as we often do not give enough thought to all the information being presented in this introductory piece. Since I have read the story, of course I know that there are certain things I want them to catch, so this was very much a baby-step assignment. 

I established the purpose of our reading of chapter 1: focus on identifying Contrasts & Contradictions, a skill we have been working on for weeks now. I liked them before, but I now believe I am head-over-heels in love with Contrasts & Contradictions. Adam Levine may be People's sexiest man alive, but he ain't got nothin' on 25 students asking some deep questions.

Before I present the list, let me preface by saying this: I helped point out some of the CCs, but any discussion afterward was left to my students. There was oohing, aaahing, and oh-my-goshing from them and a lot of shoulder shrugging and playing stupid from me. 

So here is what "we" uncovered in chapter 1:

• Jets flying overhead is not frightening to us, especially since we live in proximity to the DFW airport, but this is not the same for the people in the community. 
• We do not have speaker systems set up in our neighborhoods with unknown voices telling us what to do. We have a speaker system at school, but students often to not even pay attention when an administrator comes on because they deem it unimportant. In the community, these not only exist, but any directions are followed immediately. 
• Being released from class is a good thing, but being released in the community does not appear to be a good thing at all. The kids did discuss what the possibilities might be. They suggested everything from death to banishment to the desert.
• Jonas is concerned about word choice, but we say whatever they think whenever they think it. 
• We do not tend to recognize when apologies are necessary, but in the community, they are required. (The kids also noted that the repetition of the apology was an Again & Again signpost.)
• We don't share feelings with our parents. Eeeew! Jonas and family have to discuss feelings because it is a rule. 
• Jonas and Lily do not know what animals are. (Although they identified this one, many of my students were quite confused about how this could possibly be. I am curious to see how they react when they learn why.)
• Job roles are reversed in the story based on our stereotypical views (nurses are women; law enforcement workers are men). 
• In our culture, we are not given spouses. (This did lead to some discussion of different cultures and religions around the world. I also started giving them classmates and spouses, and they were not happy.)
• In our culture, there is not a limit on the number of kids or specified genders. (Some of the classes discussed that the babies must be given like the spouses because that's the only way this arrangement could happen. As they talked about this, they began to realize that the babies must be made in some unnatural way.)

I am proud of myself for a much better start to teaching this novel than I had last year, and I am proud of my students for showing that their brains do work right before a holiday. 

The Giver: Chapter 1

While my Pre-AP students are reading Milkweed, my academic students will be reading The Giver. Last year, I will honestly admit that I did some of my worst teaching with The Giver. I was frustrated with my students. They refused to read outside of class, impeding the lessons I was trying to cover in class. For the most part, we listened to the book and did very little with it. Of course, when I was doing this, my newly-promoted secondary superintendent was brought to my classroom to view some of the finest teaching our school has to offer. (sigh) Not my best moment, but I refuse to let it happen again. 

Prior to beginning the novel, we will be going through our Texas Literacy Initiative vocabulary routine with the word release. Although I know my kids know this word, I want to put focus on it since it is such an important concept in the novel. We will be viewing the presentation with Nearpod so that I may assess understanding of the term. I am not expecting any issues here. We will come back to discuss this more after reading the first chapter of the book. 

Last year, I began by having my students create their own perfect societies, but it become more of a distraction and never truly connected to the novel the way I had initially intended. This year, I'm throwing that out the window. For chapter 1, we will focus on Contrasts & Contradictions from Notice and Note. They are already familiar with Contrasts & Contradictions, but now we are going to shift away from characters and focus on the setting. I want them delving deeply into the differences between Jonas' world versus our own to see what this "perfect" world is like. 

In preparing the Contrasts & Contradictions lesson, I incorporated Christopher Lehmans' Close Reading Ritual from Falling in Love with Close Reading. The lenses will be focused on the setting of the story. The patterns will be the Contrasts & Contradictions. We will then use this information to create a picture of Jonas' society. 

As with some of my previous lessons, I am going to have my students respond to the presentation questions using Nearpod. By using Nearpod, I ensure that every student submits a response, rather than letting another student answer on his/her behalf. I can skim through their responses and see who is understanding the text and the strategy, as well as who is not. This information is also saved in a report that I can use as needed.

This is definitely a better start from last year's teaching. Ain't nobody comin' back this year to say I ain't doin' my J-O-B!