Lesson Twelve- The “Big” Idea of January’s Sparrow
Time
30 minutes
Materials
January’s Sparrow
Writing Journal
Observation chart
Objectives
To have student synthesize the meaning of the story and the theme behind Patricia Polacco’s work. To understand the main idea.
GLCES
S.DS.04.02 engage in interactive, extended discourse to socially construct meaning in book clubs, literature circle, partnerships, or other conversational protocols.
English Language Arts
Standard 9. Depth of Understanding
All students will demonstrate understanding of the complexity
of enduring issues and recurring problems by making
connections and generating themes within and across texts.
Procedure
1. Review January’s Sparrow together as a whole class. Discuss the details of the story.
2. On the board teacher will draw a t-chart, one column will be observations and the other leave blank at the moment.
3. Discuss with the students that you make observations every time you listen to a story.
4. Write on left side of the chart “What I….”then write heard, saw, and felt. Tell students to record what they heard while teacher was reading the story, what they saw (illustrations) as teacher was reading the story, and what they felt as the teacher read the story. Then tell students to write what it made them think about
5. Have students converse and engage with the person next to them. Have them work together and share aloud their observations. Tell students to question each other about their observations.
6. Students will then ask each other and each individually comes up with their own answer to the statement…
I learned from this story….
The most important thing I learned from this story was….
7. Have students share aloud with the class what they came up with as the “big” idea from Patricia Polacco’s story.
Evaluation
It will be known that students understand what the “big” idea of Patricia Polacco’s story is when they engage in independent thinking and participate in partner discussion
Assessment
Students will think about and write observations about January’s Sparrows. They will synthesize what they heard, saw, and felt, they will think about how it made them feel and then they will turn it into a main idea about what they learned from the story and what they saw as most important about the story.
Revisions
Instead of pairing them up individually I just had them work with their partner and I decided to do the observations on January’s Sparrow rather than Pink and Say because it was more recent for them and I believe that they enjoyed the story more. I also decided to do this lesson ten minutes before I did it. The literacy coach had a meeting with the fourth grade teachers and was talking about ideas for lesson plans from the Lucy Cawlkins book and I really liked this one and she kept stressing the importance of finding the big idea of the story and we were already working on and brainstorming ideas for our individual stories so I thought the lesson fit in perfectly and did it right when they came back from lunch and it worked well!
Reflection
While I was describing what I wanted the students to do for their charts I had a lot of puzzled looks. As I wrote down the “hear, saw, felt, think about” part on the chart I got even more questions about what they were asked to do. I then used examples of my own experience from the story to get the students to understand more clearly what I wanted them to do. After I used my own examples it made more sense to them. I did a demonstration of the thinking and conversing process that I wanted to go on with the students. I think showing them what a conversation should look like helped them keep on task and know what they were supposed to be talking and thinking about. I realized that the students needed a lot of think time after they had written down their observations and been questioned by their classmate. Only a couple students could come up with a good sentence about what they thought the most important thing from the story was or what they learned from it right away. From this lesson I realized how important that “wait time” is for a student after you ask them a question or ask them to do something. The results were amazing. I believe the students did so well with this and I think they also really enjoyed the activity. They came up with wonderful and inspiring thinking that makes me think I would do the lesson no way differently than I did.
Lesson Fourteen- Writing a Draft