Freedom Summer Literacy Companion: Pin It to Win It

Can you believe we are already half way through January!  I'm not sure about you, but these two weeks have been long and interesting! I was looking forward to this long weekend to catch up on some sleep, laundry, and planning!

Throughout my years of teaching I've always looked forward to the MLK weekend to get caught up and to start planning my for February. With February known as Black History Month, Presidents, and Love I always try to tie my teaching standards to those topics.  One of the books I utilize in February is Freedom Summer.  I love this story of friendship and how it overcomes segregation during a difficult time period in our nation's history.

Last year I used my  Freedom Summer Literacy Companion Pack with a third grade class during our MOY mClass assessments.  Here is an overview of how I used this resource as I taught character traits and reading comprehension with Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles.

MY LESSON

Pairs & Whole Group

We started our lesson out using the Fan-N-Pick Context Clues cards (Pairs).  I loved hearing their discussions for the the word "shell".  The sentence in the text was, "We shell butter beans together".  They came up with some pretty good definitions: share, cover, and cook.  They were pretty surprised by the actual definition.  During Whole-Group I read each sentence and we discussed the definitions they came up with and each word's actual definition.

Whole Group & Pairs

I then read aloud Freedom Summer to them, stopping to discuss our vocabulary again, asking guiding questions, etc.  Any time I asked a question I had the students turn and talk to the person next to them before I called on one student for the answer.  Doing this requires ALL students to participate and not just the one or two students who always raise their hand.  Once we read and discussed the story we worked on the graphic organizer.

Whole Group & Pairs & Whole Group

We completed the Time Period and Character components together.  I had them work together with a partner or group to complete the "Important Events" and "Evidence Joe is a Good Friend" components.  We then went over their responses as a  whole class.

Independent

They were getting chatty by this time, we had a snow day yesterday, and I was in there first thing this morning.  I assigned them to start working on the Comprehension Brochure independently.  These questions are Higher Order thinking questions and I knew it would be a little bit of a challenge for some of them, but appropriate for them to think about and try.

Now is your chance to WIN a copy of Freedom Summer and my Freedom Summer Literacy Unit Companion! To enter simply PIN any image from this post and comment below with the link to your pin and email.  I will use random.org to choose one lucky winner. Pin-It-To-Win-It will end Jan. 24th and the winner will be announced Jan. 25th.