Introduction:
Literary Tea Parties are one way to build students’ background knowledge about the text through inferences about characters, plot, and possible themes. Each student will be provided with a quote from the text. Students will be invited to mingle with one another in dyads, read their quotes to each other, then theorize how their pieces of the text might connect with each other and with the other pieces of text they have acquired from other peer interactions. As students collaborate, they will build theories about the characters, plot, setting, themes, etc. Chosen quotes for the Literary Tea Party should reflect important elements of the story and characters but leave room for student inferences and theories without explicitly revealing key events or turning points. We created a Literary Tea Party for George (Gino, 2015) that invites readers to make theories and predictions about the key characters of Melissa, Kelly, Mom, Scott, Jeff, Rick, Ms. Udell, and Principal Maldonado. Students will be able to make inferences about the plot, conflict, setting, and possible themes based off their quotes and conversations with classmates.
Click HERE for the Printable Version of our Literary Tea Party for George (Gino, 2015), all quotes included.
The comprehension planning resources below focus on the interconnected goals of Thinking about Characters and Understanding Themes & Ideas across the reading of the anchor text, George (2015) by Alex Gino. The goals and comprehension mini-lessons referenced in these resources are from Serravallo's (2015) The Reading strategies Book: Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Readers. Through this unit of instruction, students should develop deeper levels of understanding about the key topics (gender identity, expression, roles, and stereotypes) through thinking deeply and widely about the characters, themes, and ideas presented in the texts. Students who demonstrate "approaching" comprehension of George (Gino, 2015) may not quite grasp the nuances of power, socialization, and the gender binary represented in Melissa's struggles, but they should understand that Melissa's true identity is female and she wants to be recognized in her family, school, and community as such. Students should be able to reference key moments from the text when Melissa faced discrimination based off her perceived gender identity and the ways in which she and Kelly disrupted socially constructed stereotypes about gender expression. Students who demonstrate "exceptional" comprehension and higher-level critical thinking in relation to George (Gino, 2015) will be able to ask and answer problem-posing, critical questions about power, voice, socialization, gender identity, expression, roles, and stereotypes and recognize the ways in which friends and families can take action and assert personal and social agency. All students should have a deepened, more fluid understanding of gender identity and expression and be able to recognize and interrogate social constructions of gender roles and stereotypes in the world after reading this text and engaging in the subsequent comprehension activities before, during, and after reading George (Gino, 2015).
George is divided into 4 sections to support comprehension planning in the Google Slides below. Each section features problem-posing and/or critical thinking questions, suggested connections to texts from text set list to be used with each section of book, and strategy-based mini-lessons from The Reading Strategies Book (Serravallo, 2015) to support students' engagement, comprehension, and critical thinking.
After students have read and discussed each section of George (Gino, 2015), consider using alternative layouts such as Transmediation and Book Talks to assess student comprehension. These multimodal and semiotic responses require students to have a rich depth of understanding and to assign significance in terms of theme, character development, and author's message.
Transmediations provide an open-ended mode of assessment that invite students to translate their thoughts, ideas, and language into non-linguistic and symbolic representations. Teachers can invite students to create a transmediation that reflects a character's development or theme(s) from George and host a gallery walk. During the gallery walk, students should display their transmediations around the classroom and rotate through one another's pieces, jotting notes about the ways in which different pieces invited them to think differently or more deeply about an aspect of the novel. At the end of the gallery walk, invite students to engage in a final Sketch-to-Stretch in response to the same prompt as their initiating experience, "What do you think about when you hear the word "GENDER"?" Then, ask students to compare and contrast their initial Sketch-to-Stretch and their final Sketch-to-Stretch and write what they learned about the critical topics of gender expression and identity through transactions with George.
Book Talks
Invite students to create their own video Book Talks for George after providing them with many strong models of Book Talks for a variety of texts from the text set (or other texts your students are familiar with). Teacher should model how to write a strong Book Talk, record, and upload to a class blog/website so that students are publishing for a real audience. Encourage students to write a draft of the main points they wish to communicate in their George Book Talk, including important characters, themes, and lessons learned about the critical topics surrounding gender. Students can also be invited to address the following focusing questions in their Book Talk in relation to George:
Additionally, invite students to share how George changed them as a person and how they will act and interact differently with others after reading George. Encourage students to cite evidence of their learning and support their ideas with examples from the text that demonstrate strong understanding without sharing spoilers about the key elements of the plot with the web audience. If you create a time limit (2 minutes or so) for the video Book Talks, students will have to prioritize their message and assign significance to different elements of their comprehension. This activity incorporates media and technology and oral expression into a comprehension assessment that can be adapted to hone in on various comprehension goals and objectives.
Comprehension is an active and interactive process that requires discussion as students process and share their inward thinking outwardly, adjust and refine ideas based on the thinking of their peers, and continue to construct a deeper understanding of the topic or text. Therefore, from a sociocultural perspective, discussion is a critical component of comprehension and student understanding. Students benefit from the social interaction and the back-and-forth of conversation as they deconstruct and reconstruct critical topics and ideas.