Mark Zusak once said, "Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you finish just to stay near it." The Book Thief was one of these books for me. My greatest desire is to my students to one day feel that same way about a book.
Our school is quite diversified, with low income boundary students and the higher income gifted and talented program.
We need reading materials that our lower income students can connect with, but it also needs to offer new ideas and opinions for the gifted and talented. Our lower income students need so badly to be a part of something bigger than themselves and to feel that they have the power to change their futures. Reading good, engaging literature will help with this.
My Project
We will be covering a unit later on this year discussing how important moments in our lives change us. Using The Book Thief as scaffolding, we will first discuss the important moments of the main character and her resulting change. Students will have a multi-media project applying the same unit question to themselves. They will end by writing a personal narrative describing how an important moment in their life changed them. Students will analyze throughout the reading of the book positive and negative ways in which the main character changed with the events. Their narrative will incorporate both views from their life as well.
It is expected that at the end of the unit, students will know how to effectively craft a narrative, and that they will be able to identify different ways to react to situations in life and how that will affect their future, as seen in the novel.
Coming from a low income school offers few resources for the purchase of literature that our young adults can connect with.
A lack of this connection with literature results in a lack of reading and literacy. It is essential for my students to have this good literacy in order to create a better life for themselves in the future. Literature will help them believe there is a better life in the future.
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