Annie Witten CT 4133
Social Issue Book Clubs Spring, 2007
A Rationale and Overview of this Unit of Study
Why Social Issues? Why Book Clubs?
As students grow and mature in their reading lives, they will begin to find that they can make more sophisticated connections to the books that they read. They have long had the strategies to find issues of personal importance in the books that they read: much like Peter, they have felt jealous of a sibling; similar to Opal, they have been a stranger in a new town. Once they reach 4th and 5th grades, however, they will have the capacity to push their thinking further to find issues of societal importance. How exciting it is to realize that it’s not just a two-way relationship (reader to book) but rather, a three way relationship – reader to book to society! As teachers, we can plan a curriculum that gives our readers the tools to extend their ideas beyond the classroom and into the world at large.
In their fantastic book, For a Better World: Reading and Writing for Social Action, Randy and Katherine Bomer stress and elucidate the need to bring critical literacy into the reading workshop, not only to expand our students’ capacities as readers, but to ensure that social justice is integrated and emphasized in the curriculum. For this to happen, they suggest, we need to give our readers opportunity to discuss these issues in an ongoing conversation. In this particular unit, a chance to converse, debate, and explore issues in books is centered around book clubs. You will provide your readers with the structure and scaffolding that they need to start and pace these conversations, but they will bring their observations and opinions to the table.
Teaching our Readers to Examine Books through Lenses
Our students need and deserve the opportunity to pour through books with the purpose of thinking and talking about an issue of importance; to be able to develop an opinion, point out stereotypes, and decide if they want to be the type of person who goes through life thinking about social change. As teachers, though, we need to make sure that our students are still growing as readers, learning skills that will enrich their reading lives and strengthen their reading capacities.
This unit allows you to teach a reading skill – examining texts through lenses – while your students explore a social issue of their choosing. In your previous units you may have noticed that students were fixating on one central theme, a character, a setting. This unit will teach children that a book has many different facets, and we can use our minds as lenses to zoom in and focus on one, but without losing touch of the story as a whole. So if we choose to concentrate on how a social issue is represented through the perspective of a character, we can do that – but we will also pay attention to the plot, the language the author uses, etc. This will be a useful skill and will enrich our students’ reading as they move on to more complicated books that require multi-faceted thinking. Students will also learn that, when they read through a lens, they may find those “hidden issues” that are not so obvious.
Timeline & Student Requirements
Ideally, this unit should come towards the end of the year, in April or in May. Students will have had experience working in book clubs and will understand the procedures and expectations you have for them when they are gathering in a group. Additionally, they will have had units on interpretation, inference, genre study, and non-fiction reading under their belts, which will be important skills to lean on when moving into a social issue unit.
This unit is recommended for 4th and 5th grade students; however, a mature class of 3rd graders may be able to do the work with modifications. If any of your readers are English language learners, it would be beneficial to review important vocabulary with them on an ongoing basis; better still would be to provide them with literature in their native language that they may read in addition to books in English to help them feel more comfortable with the actual issue the class has chosen to discuss.
Organizing the Unit
Before the unit starts, you’ll want to begin gathering books, stories, and non-fiction texts relating to a wide range of social issues. Make sure that you have equal amounts for all reading levels represented in your classroom (ie, you have books relating to bullying that each reader can tackle.) The first week of the unit is an introduction and exploration of social issues, so the books can be mixed-issue in leveled baskets. After your students pick the social issue that they would like to concentrate on, you can create a section in your library specifically for that topic.
In order to truly build their understanding of social issues, as well as work on the skill of reading through different lenses, students need to have ample time to read. For this reason, three book club meetings per week are suggested through the unit. However, if you feel that the discussions are overpowering the amount of time actually spent reading, you may choose to decrease the amount of times the book clubs meet, or to turn the time set aside for book clubs into a whole class discussion that is separate from reading workshop time.
*See appendix for suggested books/social issue topics. Randy and Kathleen Bomer’s book also contains ideas for social issues that can be discussed through literacy.
Read Aloud
Over the course of this unit, choose read-alouds that support the work that you are doing with reading through lenses, as well as identifying and labeling social issues. The first week, you may want to be more explicit when discussing social issues, and then as the unit progresses, allow the children to point them out and discuss them. You can also use your read-alouds to address problems that you see students having, through the questions that you ask and the “think alouds” that you do.
You may want to choose one or two texts that you refer to throughout the unit as your “touchstone texts.” These are books that the students will become very familiar with, so that you can go back to a single part during a minilesson to demonstrate a skill. During the first week, you may want to concentrate on these two texts – reading and re-reading them with the students, digging out the social issue, learning about the characters, and having strong conversations around the plots.
Here are some questions that you may want to use throughout this unit during your read alouds, both as “think alouds” and turn and talks:
· Who are the characters here, and what issues are they facing?
· What are the characters reactions to these issues?
· How do characters deal with these issues?
· What perspective does each character have on this issue?
· Is this fair? Why? Why not?
· What did we just learn from reading this page/chapter/book about a specific social issue?
· If you were this character, what would you be thinking right now? What would you be feeling right now?
· How does what we just read connect with some of the other books that we’ve read before
*Some questions taken/adapted from the TC Curricular Calendar and For a Better World.
Unit Overview
Week One
Introduction to Social Issues. Readers make a distinction between ideas and themes that we relate to on a personal level and those that impact society as a whole – Identifying and conceptualizing Social Issues.
This first week is intended to introduce your students to the concept of a social issue, as well as give them some of the tools that they will need to discuss social issues with their book clubs. Give your students the opportunity to read a variety of short stories and texts relating to multiple social issues (such as bullying, gender, class, wants/needs – see Appendix for a more complete list of suggestions.) This week, provide rich material that your readers will be able to get through quickly, and where the social issues are readily apparent – this will scaffold your readers and prepare them for the weeks ahead when they will be doing more advanced work. Depending on your readers, you may suggest that they limit themselves to one selection from the Social Issues basket during Readers Workshop this week, maintaining an independent reading book that they pick up once they have read a short book or short story from the basket.
Session 1 (Minilesson provided in detail)
One way that readers can determine the social issues that are present in their book is noticing when an idea makes us stop and think – “it’s just not fair!” We think about why this issue seems unfair to us.
Session 2 (Strategy lesson for this session provided in detail)
Sometimes, we notice ideas in books that don’t resonate with us on a personal level. However, this doesn’t mean that these issues are not important. Readers use our imagination to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and we ask ourselves, “Could this issue be important to someone else, even if it is not important to me?”
Session 3 (From TC Draft Social Issue Packet)
Book Clubs Meet
When readers talk with each other about social issues in our book clubs, we use specific language that helps us push our thinking even harder. Some of the things we might say are:
“I think this isn’t fair because…”
“Why do you think that?”
“Another example of the same thing is…”
“What you are saying is making me change my first ideas because now I am realizing…”
“But couldn’t you read this differently and say…”
“I agree because…”
“I disagree because…”
Session 4
Book Clubs Meet
Readers develop names and labels for the important issues we discovered in our reading by talking about our notes with our book clubs. (At the end of Readers Workshop today, come together as a whole class. Generate a list of the names and labels that students developed in their book clubs. As a class, vote on the issue that we want to study for the next three weeks.)
Session 5
Introduction to our social issue study: gender. When readers are investigating gender, we think about certain questions:
How are the female and male characters represented?
Are they portrayed differently in terms of their strength and vulnerability?
Who acts and who reacts?
Whose actions are central to the story?
What are the ways in which the characters act and respond?
What kinds of relationships do the characters have?**
**Questions adapted from For a Better World: Reading and Writing for Social Action.
Today, I want you to pick one of these questions and just think about it while you are reading. Get comfortable with these questions because we’re going to be using them a lot in the upcoming weeks!
**A note to teachers: These questions can be adapted for most social issues that your students choose to study – bullying, poverty, friends, family issues, racism, environment, peer pressure, etc. A fantastic resource to help you generate ways to think about these issues is Katherine and Randy Bomer’s book. If your students decide to focus on an issue less mainstream (i.e., animal rights or hunger,) you can work as a class to create a framework for examining the issue. Questions to start you off might include: why is this issue important? How is this issue stereotypically portrayed? Who are the players involved in this issue, and how do we normally view them?
Week Two
Readers use our minds as lenses that help us zoom in and learn more about the Social Issues that we are exploring.
Over the course of this week, you will teach your students that good readers use their minds like a camera to learn more about gender (or any other social issue): zooming in to focus specifically on an issue, as well as zooming out to look at the text as a whole. Some strategies for reading through a lens that you will show them include looking for parts of the story that address the issue and marking those places with post-its, and thinking about the issue from the point of view of a character in the story. Start your readers off this week with a short text that focuses on the chosen topic that they can read and then re-read, to assist them in the process of first zooming in on an issue and then moving back out wide to understand the story as a whole. In book clubs, they will progress to reading full-length, group-selected books appropriate to their reading levels. Remind your students that as they move from one text to another, they need to bring their new knowledge about the issue with them. You will conclude this week by introducing the concept of talking across books – this lesson will be reinforced with more minilessons and strategy sessions next week.
Session 1 (Minilesson provided in detail)
Good readers prepare our minds to focus on a social issue before we jump into our books. We do this by reviewing our notes and thinking about the conversations we’ve had.
Strategy Lesson: Take aside a group of your readers who may have difficulty thinking and talking from a different perspective and review tomorrow’s minilesson. You might want to use some of the strategies from last week’s small group session, or prepare different ones depending on your readers. They may want to create a diagram or chart about their characters to prepare themselves for tomorrow’s work.
Session 2
Book Clubs Meet
Readers, we did such an amazing job yesterday of really zooming in and focusing on gender in our books by first prepping our minds and then reminding ourselves of our guiding questions. Today, I’m going to teach you another strategy for learning even more about our social issue when we are meeting with our book clubs. When good readers want to probe even deeper into the social issue we are studying, we think about the issue from someone else’s perspective. Specifically, we choose a character from a book that we are reading (or have read) and we talk with others about that social issue from the point of view of that character.