Guided Storywriting

Hi, how's it going?

I hope you're well, and I really do mean that - this has been a tough year for everyone and being a teacher in the public system looks like it might only become more challenging as we move into 2021. I've long been a big believer in free education for all but I know how hard it is not to feel demoralised and disillusioned sometimes when working within this system. What's that adage... nothing worth doing was ever easy? 

Teaching isn't easy. 

So, fellow teachers, I hope you're all kind on yourselves as we move into Term 4 of 2020. I hope I can be kind on myself too! Today I thought I'd share a stand-alone worksheet that worked well with my mixed-ability Year 8 classes in that nebulous part of the year where we were all trying to get students back on track after everyone isolated during NSW's first COVID wave. This lesson was designed to focus the students on building their literacy skills, and it bought me some time so I could continue planning some longer term work for my classes.

Guided Storywriting - Worksheet.

The first half of the lesson involves students filling in an open-ended cloze passage that comes with annotations that 'guide' the sort of answers that will work best. This is useful for students who aren't yet at the point where they can generate ideas in sufficient number, and helps them ascertain what categories of words work well in particular contexts.

The second half of the lesson contains some Super Six Strategies to extend student comprehension, and this includes visualisation, connection, and monitoring/summarising activities.

Have a nice term! :)

August Heat

Hello from Amber-land!

Below you'll find some resources that have been developed for a lesson that can be taught with Years 7-10 English. Normally I'd discuss the way the lesson works but today I'm going to take a different approach by reflecting a little on how the lesson went and how it was developed/delivered. I find it useful to blog about this process as putting it into words helps me crystallise how I teach. If you're already an experienced teacher just on the look-out for some resources then, by all means, feel free to skip down to the bit about the PowerPoint and activity sheet and disregard anything you already know :)

Preamble done.

Now, to start with, my friend and colleague Kira Bryant, who is also my Head Teacher, brought to the faculty's attention a great short story called 'August Heat' by William Fryer Harvey. Kira said it worked well with her Year 7 class, so I figured I'd give it to a go with three of my junior classes - two Year 8s and a Year 9 class.

(Incidentally, Kira has a really cool blog called Tales from an Edugeek that has a whole stack of stuff about English teachers who write.)

'August Heat' is suitable for our purposes for a number of reasons:

• It isn't too short and it isn't too long - just the right length for the 'mainstream' in a junior classroom (that zone of proximal development that we all love so much!)
• It was published in 1910, which makes it 110 years old, and therefore public domain. As it's not subject to copyright laws there's therefore no legal problem photocopying or printing it for the classroom.
• The style of writing isn't too inaccessible for today's teenagers. The prose is straightforward but not without a certain poetry, and Fryer Harvey's craft as a storyteller should grab the attention for at least a suitable portion of the class.
  
• The content could be described as 'horror' or, at least, in the realms of the mysterious and supernatural. Kira describes it as having an ending with "just the right amount of ambiguity to challenge our students". In any case, the story isn't too inappropriate for young adolescents, and it has an effective sense of dread and mystery that builds in detail until the wonderfully enigmatic ending.
  

So, as I was saying, I decided to use it with three classes.

The lesson itself was designed to be relatively direct. Getting students back into seats in a shared classroom has been, to put it lightly, a bit of a challenge after the disruptions caused by COVID-19 over the last three months. I initially attempted to do a class novel when each of my junior classes returned but that didn't really work out the way that I'd hoped. Each student was moving from separate, individualised online learning to working in a single room with the same novel, ostensibly learning at the same pace. I tried this with my four junior classes (two Year 9s, two Year 8s) and this approach is only really working with one of them so I had to abandon it for the other three classes.

Side-note: Don't be afraid to abandon a lesson that just isn't working. Adapting to the needs of a classroom is paramount to both their sanity and yours. I learned this very early on in my career. Sure, it can be depressing to see a beautifully-designed lesson just completely clunk in the face of disengaged students, but learning how to deal with this is preferable to taking it personally. When this happens to me, and it still happens even now because I like to keep trying different things, then I tend to take two approaches:

1. Recognise where exactly the lesson went wrong and learn from this.
   
2. Use the remaining time of the 'lost' lesson to work individually with students who are still engaged and/or build rapport by talking to the disengaged about why the lesson isn't working for them. If it's a case that the student is 'acting out' then, more times than not, it could be because the work is too difficult for them. Their behaviour should still be dealt with in an appropriate manner (that's a blog for another day), however, the 'tipping point' where they lost the will to learn is invaluable information if you can pinpoint where, when, and why it happened. That, in itself, is informal assessment of student ability.

Anyway. I abandoned the novel study with my two Year 8 classes and my other Year 9 class. I decided that self-contained lessons with minimal whole-class instruction was the best way to go. I also wanted to have it student-centered so I could spend my time doing one on one instruction or 'crowd control' around the room, so I put all the activities onto a single double-sided sheet.

Here's the lesson:

1. Read through the short story with the class. This is presented in PPT form after I heard my colleague Blake speaking about how much more engaged students can be when reading through a screen. Something about smartphone conditioning I guess! I broke the story up across slides with an image for each part of the story (except for one slide).
2. Students work through the six activities on the sheet. There are six of these to correspond with each of the Super 6 activities. I wanted to do something like this after blogging about the Super 6 a couple of weeks ago, so I split the sheet into two halves - the first half is for the students to do before and during activities (Predicting, Monitoring, Questioning), and the second half is for after (Visualising, Summarising, Connecting). I won't go into too much detail as the activities are deliberately self-explanatory to make it as student-directed as possible.
   

Reflecting: The actual lessons with each individual class all turned out very differently. I did the lesson three times across a Friday. Our school has a 5 period day, and I delivered the lesson for Year 8 Class A in Period 1, Year 8 Class B in Period 4, and Year 9 Class A in Period 5.

• Year 8 Class A: This went really well. The class was engaged for the entire short story and the majority of them finished the sheet. Some students struggled with certain parts of the sheet but I was able to simply flip the sheet over and let them pick an activity from the back - after listening to and watching 'August Heat' some students with additional learning needs were quite happy to express their learning visually or tell me stories of how it connected to other things.

• Year 8 Class B: Even though they're both Year 8, this class is really quite different to Class A as it contains a whole range of students with quite diverse learning needs. This class found it significantly more difficult to focus for the entirety of the story so I simply read up until the slide with no picture (this slide is needed to cover the visualisation activity) and told the class that was where it ended. The students who had no issues paying attention were still able to complete the sheet and came up with interesting ideas that demonstrated their comprehension. For the students who had struggled I was able to walk around to them, one by one, and explain whatever had confused them. The variety of activities on the sheet gave every student at least one entry point to show their comprehension. From this point on I just wandered the room, keeping students on task, clarifying information, and answering any questions students had.

• Year 9 Class A: As per the law of diminishing returns, Year 9 were even less engaged than Year 8 Class B. This was last period on a Friday, and the class came in off the back of lunchtime, so I guess they were all ready to go home! Usually this particular period starts with a cascade of groaning requests, like, "It's last period Friday sir, can we do something fun?" (My response of "This is English, it's always fun" is not usually well-received) or "Can we just have a chill lesson?" (Response: "Nah bro"). I made the quick decision to follow the same approach I used with Year 8 Class B, opting to cut the PPT short at the halfway mark. Sheet completion was probably around the 20-30% mark, with another 40% at least doing half of it, and the remaining 20-30% of the class still doing at least one activity after the reading portion. Not ideal, but better than the last Friday Period 5 I'd had with them.   

In hindsight, I've decided that the lesson works fairly well and I'm sure I'll use it again next year. That said, the inability of two of the classes to focus through the entire PPT while the story was read to them isn't what I had hoped for. I knew that some of the students in Year 8 Class B in particular would find it quite challenging so it wasn't a surprise, but these things still need to be tried.

For the next lesson I did an entirely self-contained sheet with no whole class instruction and no PPT/board work. I figured this would be a better work-around for students unable to focus on teacher-talk for any amount of time. This turned out to work even better but more on that in a future blog.

Focus on Reading and Super Six Strategies

I have to admit that I'm finding it difficult to think pedagogically at the moment. What I mean by that is that I'm usually trying to think and plan ahead into the next term or two. I always want to backward map as much as possible, to frontload students so that when they get to the tricky part of their learning they feel as prepared as possible. It also helps diminish my own anxiety and gives me a clear roadmap to work to - everything is transparent and students know exactly what's coming up throughout each term. Assessment tasks can be given to students far in advance of due dates, and it usually frees up my spare periods to concentrate on head teacher responsibilities, or welfare troubleshooting, helping students 1:1, or any other long projects I might be working on. 

In the age of COVID-19 it just feels impossible trying to plan for anything. Our goalposts are getting moved almost daily... and it isn't anyone's fault, it's just kind of how it is. Being able to plan far ahead has become a privilege rather than a necessity. 

I hate it.

Whenever I get stuck like this I tend to favour a back-to-basics approach. When times are complicated then the work should be simpler. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (pictured above) makes it pretty clear that students are less likely to be able to engage with curriculum if their basic needs aren't being met and, as this pandemic provokes and fertilises a seemingly neverending range of issues straight out of a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, I don't blame them. A lot of students are going to find it difficult to take complicated course content on board in order to "become the most that one can be" if they feel that their safety needs are being threatened by a pandemic.

I always come back to the Super Six Literacy strategies. 

Some time in the past, I think it might have been 2013 or 2014, my school undertook the Focus on Reading professional development modules. Others will be able to tell you about this literacy initiative more than me... what I will say instead is that this particular professional learning galvanised my appreciation for teaching literacy skills. The Focus on Reading modules just felt so wonderfully practical and I'm glad to see that the Department of Education is currently working on a new version of it.

I replicate some of the Super Six-related strategies below in the absence of their current availability. 

Here's an example, from Page 8 of Module 1, drawing upon Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency by I. Fountas and G. Pinnell (2006, pp.463-464). This demonstrates some ways in which students can practice independent writing in relation to their reading:

Writing and Drawing About Reading

Using words, phrases or sketches on stick-on notes or in the notebook to note:

• Place where you made a personal prediction
• Predictions
• Place where you found out something about a character
• Wonderings
• Place where you learned new information
• Place that you found confusing
• Place that you found interesting
• Memorable language
• Place that reminded you of another book

Short writing activities - a few sentences or paragraphs produced quickly in a notebook or a long stick-on note that is placed in a notebook:

• Reaction to the writer's style
• A prediction
• Response to a selected quote
• Response to a peer's thinking
• Reaction to a character
• Thoughts about the writer's craft
• Thoughts about the writer's message
• Comments on the writer's point of view
• Thoughts about how the text reveals life issues
• New understandings or insights
• Using knowledge of the genre to think about character, plot, theme, setting
• Links to other texts
• Story map

Graphic organisers - words, phrases, sketches, or sentences on graphic organisers or drawn in a notebook:

• Web
• Time sequence chain
• Comparison/contrast chart
• Cause/effect chart
• Problem/solution chart
• Grid for comparing elements or taking notes
• Outline
• Letter to the teacher with reply (ongoing dialogue about texts)

Longer responses in the notebook elaborating on thinking about one or several texts

• Double-column entry (two-column responses with material from the text, a category or questions on the left and response or comments on the right)
• Expansion of thinking from the notes, sketches, short writing, or graphic organisers
• Letter to author or illustrator study
• Book recommendation
• Book review 

Published work - more formal responses to texts that are shared publicly

• Poem related to a text
• Picture book on a topic or subject (EG. Biography)
• Opinion essay
• Report of an author or illustrator study
• Examination of a particular theme across texts
• A character analysis or companion
• A book critique  

This particular Focus on Reading module notes go on to discuss the interrelated nature of reading and writing - the way in which learning to write should take place alongside learning to read, as one strengthens the other and vice versa.

I came to realise in light of all this that the explicit teaching of reading and writing right up to the end of Year 12 it is a fundamental part of our ongoing ability to understand complex and sustained text. Indeed, even adults need to make these processes explicit to themselves if they are to develop their own critical faculties in relation to the wider world. Learning never stops.

Super Six Literacy Strategies

The strategies mentioned above can be categorised as examples of the Super Six - to be honest, all comprehension essentially fits into this paradigm. The Super Six, in brief, are the following:

Questioning: Learners formulate and respond to questions that clarify meaning. This allows for greater depth of understanding when drilling down into texts.

Visualising: Learners create a mental image from a text. Visualising isn't necessarily a natural skill for everyone and is something that needs to be developed so that imaginative skills are engaged.

Making Connections: Learners make personal connections with the text by linking it to themselves, another text, or the wider world. This process makes use of our ability to recall information from our broader understanding of things - building pathways between different kinds of knowledge and prompting development of our ability to synthesise information.

Monitoring: Learners interrupt the reading process by stopping to check their understanding. This is an important part of comprehension as it forces the learner to develop strategies to cope with obstacles or disrupted meaning during the reading process.

Summarising: Learners identify and gather together the most significant parts of a text, restating this information in their own words. This is another valuable part of the comprehension process as it helps develop our ability to synthesise information, sort and categorise ideas, and discard irrelevant details.

Predicting: Learners use information from one part of the text to construct an idea of what will happen later in the same text. This is a valuable part of our critical thinking in that it makes explicit the way in which we adjust expectations based on the available information.

I always find myself assured that I'm doing something useful by falling back on the above six domains of comprehension while designing learning activities. Students never fail to be able to engage with these strategies and it's almost always useful in a wide range of contexts.

Food for thought :)

Stand-Alone Lesson: Parents Just Don't Understand

The last few weeks have been challenging for just about everyone. As Term 1 wound down, and the era of COVID-19 descended upon education, teachers found themselves needing to adapt to online learning platforms as a substitute for face-to-face teaching.

I don't have enough time, space, or inclination to go into my experiences in moving to Google Classroom during the last three weeks. There have been some failures, some ongoing challenges, and (I hope) some small successes. I'm still feeling my way through it all and learning about what I do and don't like, what I think might work, and how I might force things to work.

Suffice to say, this is still a teething stage. As it is for many teachers.

During the transition stage at the end of Term 1 I created the following Junior lesson in order to test a few things out. It may or may not be useful in your context if you need to fill a lesson separate to your current scope and sequence.

Firstly, students will need to watch the following music video. This was chosen in response to some Year 8 students who love rap/hip-hop... do you know how difficult it is to find family-friendly rap music? Luckily Will Smith was on hand to help me out. 

As it's a music video it would be remiss to only cover the lyrical content so I provided the students with a worksheet that covered their comprehension in terms of both written and visual literacy. The use of the table format to project questions alongside the relevant parts of the text is an adaptation of the Cornell note-taking method and is part an ongoing effort I've been making to get my Year 8 and Year 9 students to internalise the annotation process.

There are two versions of the worksheet - one for Stage 4 and one for Stage 5.

Parents Just Don't Understand - Stage 4 (Year 8 version)

Parents Just Don't Understand - Stage 5 (Year 9 version)

Note that the Year 9 version includes a question comparing this song to a previous song the class had studied. This can be adapted to suit your context.

Galway Man: Stage 5 English

Hello and how are you? It feels like only yesterday that the 2019 school year was just starting and now here we are in Term 4. Before you know it, the last assessment tasks will be done and dusted, reports will be written, and students will start thinking about building forts in the woods and riding their BMXs down to the river (kids still spent their summer holidays doing that, right?)

In the last few weeks of Term 4 I usually find myself needing a few stand-alone lessons. It's important that these lessons don't feel like 'throw-away' content... when students cotton on that you don't attach value to what they're doing then they'll tend not to value it either. The antidote to this can be to work on the skills needed for ongoing success in English.

This lesson below is a Stage 5 activity that I usually use for Year 9 as part of a genre unit focused on creative writing. It can also double, however, as something that can be used to help students develop specialised literacy skills at any point in Stage 5 - for example, the ability to identify genre through recognition of common motifs and generic conventions used, the ability to monitor a text for adjectives and adjectival groups, and utilising comprehension skills to predict the direction a text will go in.

Context

Teaching Stage 5 English in a mixed ability classroom often means working with a broad range of students. Differentiated curriculum can take many forms when we teach and, perhaps most often, it tends to come into the classroom in a flexible rapid-response form via the teacher adapting to the fluctuating levels of ability exhibited by individual students. 

One of my favourite forms of differentiation is the the lesson planning process adapted from the Gagne model and used by GERRIC. This involves creating material that targets three separate tiers of ability within the classroom - mainstream material for the core of the class, adapted material for those who may be struggling to meet outcomes, and extension material for those who may be considered gifted. It's important to acknowledge here that 'extension' doesn't mean extra work, it should instead take the place of work undertaken by the main core of the class.

Another thing to acknowledge is that it's near impossible to differentiate every single lesson of work in this way as it essentially means doing three times the work. Instead, it's worth aiming to just do this every now and again so that you can assess what level your students are working at and evaluate how they cope with material that more specifically targets their ability level.

The Lesson: Galway Man

The crux of this lesson is a short horror story called Galway Man. This piece has been designed as something that should be suitable for a Year 9 class exhibiting a range of different abilities and behaviours.

What this means is - it's relatively short to allow for engagement of students who struggle with attention in the classroom, and it's written in a way to allow accessibility for students who may have reading levels as low as those typically encountered in Stage 3. It's important to push student reading levels by exposing them to material that will challenge them but this is something that should be done purposefully and not all the time. If we're looking to build things like vocabulary, sustained understanding via extensive comprehension of cohesion, or an ability to parse sophisticated sentence structures then, of course, we should be challenging students with texts beyond their usual reading scope. However, if we want to work on introducing students to other skills like understanding symbolism and imagery, or the ability to explain genre, then we need simply-constructed texts that can allow for these things to be the focus.

Resource: Galway Man - short story.

The Lesson: Pre-Reading

Before reading the text it might be worth doing a quick check of student understanding regarding the phenomenon of bog bodies as this is the main idea behind the 'horror' of the text. These bodies are human remains that have been accidentally preserved for thousands of years after being submerged in swampy peat-heavy marshland. Bog bodies tend to occur in Western Europe and date from the Bronze Age.

Resource: Pre-Reading - PowerPoint Presentation.

The Lesson: Post-Reading

Students can undertake one of the activity sheets after reading the short story. There are two ways to approach determining who does which sheet:

1. Hand out the three different levels of sheets according to which students you think fit into the 'core', 'adjusted', and 'extension' groupings of ability. If any students question why they can't have a different sheet then, by all means, let them have a go at the sheet they prefer. If they find it too easy then you've both learned something, if they find it too hard then at least they challenged themselves.
2. Let students pick the sheet they want to do - I usually place the sheets on a table underneath the whiteboard with arrows pointing down to the three piles labelling them as 'Regular', 'Hard', and 'Hardest'. It can very educational for the teacher to see which students pick which one. 

The sheets roughly correspond to the same pattern of learning broken into 4-5 sections.

• Prediction: After students have been taken through the pre-reading PPT, ask them to think about what a short story called Galway Man might be about. Students then compare their prediction to how the story turned out.
• Adjectives: Monitor the text to locate and isolate adjectives/adjectival groups.
• Character or Flashback: Students actively consider the process of characterisation. This looks different on each sheet - ranging from a visualisation activity to an opportunity for students to draw explicit connections between a character and his purpose in the text. Some sheets may add or replace this with an examination of the story's use of a flashback as a structural narrative device.
• Genre: Students identify the ways in which the story fits into a specific genre, developing increased awareness of the significance of code and convention.

Resource: Adjusted Activity sheet
Resource: Core Activity sheet
Resource: Extension Activity sheet

Society in 1930s Stalinist Russia

The HSC Modern History National Study for Russia and the Soviet Union can pose a challenge for Modern History teachers due to the sheer breadth of content that begs to be covered. Aside from the best essay responses on the subject revealing a broad and in-depth contextual knowledge of Bolshevik Russia, it's also a fact that any half-interested History teacher will find it difficult to resist the magnetic pull of Stalinist Russia's more fascinating asides. 

For example, Stalin's second wife Nadezhda was 17 years old when she married the 43 year old Joseph Stalin. And as if that wasn't creepy enough, she was the daughter of one of Stalin's friends and Stalin had known her since she was 4! 

Of course, this is largely irrelevant if your student is faced with an essay question about collectivisation and Stalin's attempts to close the industrial gap between the USSR and the rest of the developed world. But how can we ignore the juicier bits of Russian history when it helps engage our students with the wider narrative surrounding the madness of Stalin's Soviet Union? 

My weakness with this topic is, undoubtedly, the 1930s. I tend to spend the larger slice of time teaching students about the Bolshevik consolidation of power in the 1920s and the move towards the Five Year Plans. The part that I have more trouble disseminating is the various aspects of living in Stalin's totalitarian regime - there just seems to be so much to cover, and I get so fascinated by each and every facet of this intense society that it becomes a bit of a Hobson's choice trying to work out the ones that should make up the narrative that's taught to the students. 

In addition to this challenge, I have to be careful not to ignore the skills-based part of the course. It's very appealing sometimes to just stick to the content and travel through the narrative but Year 12 students need to be able to sit down at the end of the year and write a series of essays in the pressure-cooker that is the HSC. It's sometimes assumed that Modern History students are au fait with structuring essays because the subject is so academic, however, as I've probably mentioned elsewhere on this blog, my Modern History classes tend to range from students who do Advanced English to those who do English Studies. With that in mind, I need to ensure that I'm teaching enough of the skills to support all of my students in being able to communicate what they've learned. 

This means teaching one of the key Super Six Comprehension strategies; summarising. It's easy to associate the Super Six with just primary school and Stages 4 and 5, but it can be dangerous to assume that Stage 6 students are experts at comprehension. Because, well, they often aren't. 

It's never too late to teach literacy.

Here's a resource on society in 1930s USSR: Stalin's Russia. 

And a graphic organiser to go with it: Graphic Organiser for Russian Society.

Get your students to read through the resource and use the graphic organiser to summarise the various aspects of Soviet society under Stalin. The graphic organiser is fairly straight-forward and isn't particularly different to a series of comprehension questions, however, by arranging the information in this fashion students can get an idea on how to separate their ideas. It also acts as a scaffold towards hopefully engaging the kids in creating their own summaries of documents.

The Rise of China: Lesson 6

This is the second last lesson in The Rise of China sequence and, as such, it starts off with an overview of some key points that can assist students for the upcoming assessment task. The rest of the lesson focuses A) Deepening student knowledge of the points covered in the overview, and B) Building up monitoring and decoding skills for use in source analysis. 

Anyway, here's the lesson itself...

Step 1

Project Resource 6-1 onto the white board and have students copy the mind map into their books so that they have some background knowledge on Chinese society (1958-1976) that they can use as study notes. 

Step 2

Following on from Step 1, students are to work on deepening their knowledge of Chinese society further by selecting a text from a wide reading set (Resources 6-3 and 6-4). I know two texts isn't really that 'wide', but in the class room I also include two other extracts gleamed from the excellent comic Little White Duck. I don't want to flagrantly break copyright law by scanning it and putting it up for download so I'll instead recommend that you purchase this comic for yourself as a class set.

Step 3

Students use Resource 6-2, a schema sheet that scaffolds deconstruction of sources, to analyse their selected text. This sheet asks a series of questions that assist the student in identifying tricky vocabulary and making sense of it, and then directs the student to drill down into the content of the source by categorising the words and evaluating their usage. 

This activity pulls in various elements from throughout the unit in order to combine the array of previously-taught skills into a literacy-based approach to source analysis. The hope would be that (as this is the penultimate lesson) students would complete this unit with a new understanding of how to decode sources and comprehend increasingly difficult text.

Links to resources
Resource 6-1: Chinese Society
Resource 6-2: Using Sources
Resource 6-3: Text #1 'Mao the Unknown Story'
Resource 6-4: Text #2 'Prisoner of Mao'

The Rise of China: Lesson 5

As this unit focuses on China's modernisation during the 20th Century, it makes sense for the Cultural Revolution to be viewed as the linchpin of this era. It therefore felt worthwhile to spend another lesson on this time period, one that was partially reliant on the previous lesson's content.

The main purpose of this lesson was that I wanted to try my hand at a 'floorstorm' activity, something that I picked up from Joanne Rossbridge and the Grammar and Teaching Course she conducts with Kathy Rushton. At first glance, a floorstorm is a slightly complicated-looking series of steps that students undertake with an array of resources. On the plus side though, it should roughly take an entire 1 hour lesson, and works as a scaffold to assist students in constructing their own paragraphs about a subject they are currently immersed in.

Step 1

Verbally prime the students for the lesson by asking them what they can tell you about the Cultural Revolution from the previous lesson. Ask them how they know this. This could be done as a discussion or a mind map.

Step 2

Use Resource 5-1 (or copies of the pictures at the bottom of this blog) to create several 7-picture photo sets. Students are to work in groups of 3-5 with a set of photos for each group, and come up with a list of words that could be associated with the pictures. Give each group some post-it notes to write these words on.

Step 3

Groups classify words into a table using Resource 5-2. They choose/create the categories they want to use to classify the words. It's important that the students come up with these categories themselves as taxonomy-building is an important literacy skill that links with student grammar development. It forces the students to think about the purpose of the words they've just come up with - whether they separate them by function (verbs, nouns, adjectives), or by content (people, places, events) or some other way of their own making.    

Step 4

Reveal the title of the photo set to the students as 'Public Struggle Sessions'. Using this clue, students are to then tick the words that they think will be in an unseen text about these photos. This incorporation of a prediction activity fits in with the Super 6 Comprehension Strategies and also directs the students in further building a lexicon to work with in regards to the subject of 20th Century China.

Make a list on the board from the class' suggestions (this may help students who have been struggling up until this point - it's important to have these checkpoints where these students can 'opt in' to the lesson so that you avoid a full hour's worth of disengagement)

Step 5

Teacher reads Resource 5-3 to students (they are not given a copy). Students are to listen and highlight/circle the words from their list that show up. After this, read the sheet again and have students make notes using the scaffold found in Resource 5-4.

Step 6 

Hand students Resource 5-5. This is an annotated version of Resource 5-3 that asks a variety of grammar-related questions surrounding the text. Teacher also projects this version onto the board to facilitate discussion and instruction as students work through the sheet.

Step 7

Almost there! Students now use Resource 5-6 to pull the text apart into some pre-set categories. Specifically, students identify clauses / sentence noun groups (the teacher can help here, after all - that's what we do!) and examine them for modality and emotive language. Using this scaffolding they can then draw some conclusions from the source. 

Step 8

And now that your students have done all of this, get them to use any and all of the information to construct their own paragraph with the heading 'Public Struggle Sessions'.

I know it's a lot of steps so you will need to work at a brisk pace, moving around the room from group to group to keep students on task. A big visible timer might be helpful too! The important thing is that the students collect together all these new terms while engaging with a text and are then able to write about it.

Links to resources
Resource 5-1: Photo Set
Resource 5-2: Table
Resource 5-3: Struggle Sessions
Resource 5-4: Note Taking
Resource 5-5: Struggle Sessions Annotated
Resource 5-6: Graphic Organiser

For printing purposes, here are the pictures from the photo sets as .jpgs

 

 

Obviously I don't have copyright for these pictures but they should be okay for educational usage. If anyone thinks otherwise please let know and I'll take them down.