Dallas ISD/IFL NSI - Comprehension, "After the Hurricane"

Comprehension, "After the Hurricane"

After the Hurricane TS

Note to Teachers: Task Sheet

We have provided a comprehension task sheet to mark how the instruction might look if we were in a face-to-face situation. It's helpful to plan out the task sheet to guide how you would adapt the task for online work. The work that follows is the online adaptation.

Comprehension of "After the Hurricane"

Purpose: Today we will begin reading the free-verse poem "After the Hurricane" by Rita Williams-Garcia. The purpose of this first task is for you to develop an understanding of what Freddie is thinking, feeling, and experiencing as she travels through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. You will use your quick write and annotations from this task in our next task when we analyze how Williams-Garcia uses language to help the reader experience Freddie's story.

Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina hit the coast of Louisiana in Augustof 2005. Please watch the linked video to learn more about this devistating disaster.

Step 1: Individual Reading (Pre-Work)

For a translation of the poem in Spanish, please use this link

Note to Teachers: We've added the Spanish language translation as well as some in text support in the English version of the poem to model a few of the accommodations that you could make to the text for EL students.

Please click the image to the left. This will take you to your copy of the poem "After the Hurricane" in our Google Classroom. Once you have access to your copy of the text, please read like this:

While you read, please stop at each question to respond and track what you're learning.
Please high-light words or phrases where you are confused by what the poet is saying or where you are unsure of what the word or phrase means.

You'll be asked to share your responses to the questions in your copy of the Google Doc with a parnter when we meet together on Zoom.

If you need access to the Google Classroom, please use this link

Step 2: Small Group Work (In Meeting Work)

Working with your break out room partners:

Share your responses to the questions embedded in the poem "After the Hurricane." Work to come to a shared agreement about what is happening in each of the segemented chunks of the poem.
Discuss words and places where you were confused or unsure of what the poet is trying to say.
Working from your reponses to the in-poem questions, work together to compose a quick write in response to the following questions:
- What do you learn about Freddie, King, & Japer?
- Williams-Garcia tells about experiencing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina through Freddie's eyes. What is Williams-Garcia saying about that experience? Please use evidence from the poem to support your thinking.

Step 3: Small Group Charting (In Meeting Work)

Work with your partners to create a chart that captures your quick write responses to the questions above. At the bottom of your chart, note where you and your partners agreed about what was happening in the poem and where you disagreed. Please post your chart to Google Slides.

Link for Google Slides

Copy of “After the Hurricane” comp

Step 4: Gallery Walk (In Meeting Work)

Please view each of the charts created by the other groups. As you view each chart, please note:

Where you agree with what the group has written.
Where you disagree with what a group has written.
Any questions you might have.

Please be prepared to share your thinking with the whole group during our debrief.

Step 5: Reflection (In Meeting Work)

Please revisit the quick write that you drafted with your group in Step 2 and respond to the following question:

How has your thinking about Willimas-Garcia's poem been confirmed our changed by what you saw during the gallery walk or heard during small group and whole group discussion?

Stepback as an Educator (In Meeting Work)

Please take some individual time to reflect on the work that we did to complete the comprehension task:

What did you do as a learner to comprehend the poem?
What did Sara do (or didn't do) as the facilitator/teacher to help you learn?
How are some of the principles of QtA reflected in the the work that we did?
What would it take to implement this work as a teacher?

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