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LITERARY TEA PARTY for George
LITERARY TEA PARTY for George
Supporting Comprehension BEFORE Reading
Supporting Comprehension BEFORE Reading
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.
Comprehension Goals & Objectives
Comprehension Goals & Objectives
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).
Standards Related to Comprehension Goals
Standards Related to Comprehension Goals
- 4th Grade NC ELA Reading Standards:
- CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.2 - Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text; summarize the text.
- CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.3 - Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character's thoughts, words, or actions).
- CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.9 - Compare and contrast the treatment of similar themes and topics (e.g., opposition of good and evil) and patterns of events (e.g., the quest) in stories, myths, and traditional literature from different cultures
- 4th Grade NC ELA Reading Standards:
- CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.2 - Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text, including how characters in a story or drama respond to challenges or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic; summarize the text.
- CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.3 - Compare and contrast two or more characters, settings, or events in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., how characters interact).
- CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.9 - Compare and contrast stories in the same genre (e.g., mysteries and adventure stories) on their approaches to similar themes and topics.
- CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.5.9 - Integrate information from several texts on the same topic in order to write or speak about the subject knowledgeably
Comprehension-based Learning Objectives:
Comprehension-based Learning Objectives:
- Readers will identify and discuss themes of picture books, graphic novels, poetry, and novels.
- Readers will compare and contrast gender identity, gender expression, roles, stereotypes and the level of support the characters receive from friends and family across books.
- Readers will describe the characters, setting, and events in the books and how they impact the protagonist's sense of identity or gender expression.
- Readers will define and attribute elements of personal, social, and cultural agency to a variety of books and text formats.
- Readers will use information from across texts to construct opinions and engage in critical thinking about gender identity, expression, roles, and stereotypes.
- Readers will demonstrate comprehension and synthesis of information through discussion and transmediation.
Comprehension Planning for George
Comprehension Planning for George
Supporting Comprehension DURING Reading
Supporting Comprehension DURING Reading
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.
Comprehension Assessment: Deepening Comprehension AFTER Reading
Comprehension Assessment: Deepening Comprehension AFTER Reading
Transmediation & Book Talks
Transmediation & Book Talks
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.
Transmediation: Theme & Character Development
Transmediation: Theme & Character Development
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:
- In what ways does George disrupt stereotypes and injustice?
- How do authors/characters disrupt gender roles and gender norms?
- How do authors/characters disrupt binary systems?
- How do authors position readers to think about gender?
- Whose voices are represented in these texts? Whose voices are more prominent? Less prominent?
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.
Discussion Opportunities
Discussion Opportunities
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.
Configurations:
Configurations:
- Dyads & Triads
- Sitting knee to knee, eye to eye
- Small Groups
- Inner Circle, Outer Circle
- Inner circle discusses while outer circle observes and jots down thinking
- Calling the Circle (whole-group)
Featured Strategies:
Featured Strategies:
- Inviting wonders from and between students to stimulate, drive, and guide the discussion
- Dramatic response and creation
- Tableau: a frozen scene/moment from the text
- Interview the characters
- "Say Something"
- Each student reads aloud a few lines or pages of the text and then says something!
- Ask a question
- Clarify something you misunderstood
- Make a comment, tell how you're feeling
- Make a connection to other texts, yourself, or the world
- Each student reads aloud a few lines or pages of the text and then says something!
- Ask "What if?"
- Students generate a number of "what if?" questions about the text in small groups and then act out their favorite "what if?" for the whole group
- Sketch-to-stretch and share with a partner
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