United States; T.R.I.C.K.Y.: Teenage Reality, Ideals,
Citizenship, Keepsakes, and You
JaNelle T. Cordova
Academic Setting
Introduction
It is important to value and respect people’s differences whether recognized today or from times past. Rights and responsibilities of young people have changed greatly during United States history. Recently adopting two teenage girls has made me realize how much past and present reality shapes them into the adults they are becoming. I want to show them and my students that the more they learn about and appreciate our history and citizenship in the United States, the more they can affect their present and change their ideals for the future. Teaching a two period block of Language and Literature will enable me to accomplish my goal of this unit through the use of daily writing and young adult fiction and non-fiction literature. Through the course of this unit, I plan for my students to validate daily life of teenagers throughout history, set personal goals for themselves, and realize the power they have to actively participate in the present and shape themselves into productive citizens of the future.
Student Background
The students at Garfield Middle School come from mainly low income to medium range income families. Garfield serves the Rio Grande valley area of northwest Albuquerque, with an enrollment of 665 students. Seventy-three percent of our student population qualify for free or reduced lunch and breakfast served at school. Garfield’s student body consists of 81.4% Hispanic, 12.9% Anglo, 4.0% Indian, 1.3% Black, and .3% other ethnicities. Of the 81.4% Hispanic population, near 15% are classified as LEP (limited English proficient).
With such a large Hispanic population, Garfield is recognized as a bilingual school. Nearly 65% of Garfield’s student population qualifies for Title I services. This federally funded reading program allows us to have smaller class sizes in areas of language arts and literature. This literacy focus helps reach those students that have scored below the 25th percentile on a standardized reading test. Overall, Garfield’s scores on standardized tests are lower than most schools in Albuquerque’s district.
This unit was created to be used in my regular education sixth grade Language and Literature classroom. Each two period block of time has approximately twenty children in a given period. The first period of block is separated by a passing period and the students come back for the next forty-two minute period. This class design has been a priority for Garfield and its teachers for many years. For the five years that I have been teaching middle school, I have seen this model to be beneficial, positive, and necessary.
Socially, sixth graders have a difficult time adjusting to such a large school and changing teachers. This class enables them to have six teachers a day rather than seven. In addition, this model helps the students and teachers focus more on improving the reading comprehension levels and writing skills of these new middle school students. A significant number of the children that attend Garfield have reading levels that are at least two to three grade levels lower than their own grade level when they enter. Having them for a longer period of time during the day also permits more time for writing skills to be practiced and improved.
Each week’s activities and lessons will be focused on addressing areas of the Albuquerque Public School’s District Core Curriculum Scope and Sequence (DCCSS) standards and benchmarks that are placed on language arts and literature in the sixth grade. Some of these benchmarks and standards will also be addressed in other subject areas of the DCCSS and by state curriculum requirements. A high priority for all schools is improved literacy. By utilizing a variety of different teaching strategies and different activities to focus on student’s individual strengths, I hope this improvement in the area of literacy will be apparent and continual.
Another focus or priority for sixth grade teachers this past year at Garfield was team teaching. Teams of three to four teachers planned together to teach some units or subjects together focusing on topics from the sixth grade social studies curriculum. This was a difficult task for different reasons. As stated before, Garfield is one of the smaller middle schools in Albuquerque with a usual enrollment of about 660 students. This factor combined with limited class offerings, and having selected children that did not share common teachers made this thematic teaming difficult and somewhat less beneficial than if the students shared the teachers who planned together. I, however, hope that over time and observation of other models, that this teaching strategy becomes a possibility.
The foundation of this unit is similar to its title: TRICKY. I want my students to explore the lifestyles and expectations of teenagers in United States history. Hopefully, this reality or presentation of facts will open their eyes to the opportunities of today. I will begin the nine week unit by introducing my students to a variety of young adult non-fiction, adult literature, and resource materials about the roles that teenagers had in history and the lives that they lead today.
The first two weeks will include a list of ten to fifteen vocabulary words to help the
students recognize subject area grade level vocabulary. In the following weeks, I plan to
create a "word wall" where the students continue to choose their own subject and
age appropriate vocabulary words. I see this as a form of ownership for the students in
contributing to this unit, and it leaves some room for variety and adaptation. These words
will be used in their written work, classroom discussions, and occasionally tested for
meaning. I want my students to aspire to become productive citizens or someone they
appreciate as "famous" without only focusing on the professional athlete,
singer, or movie star.
T.R.I.C.K.Y UNIT
Rationale
I want to teach this unit because I want to open my students to look at their pasts and the roles that teenagers played in the history of the United States. I want them to acknowledge and embrace their present lives as worthy and whole. I want them to set goals for the future, and be proud and productive citizens of the United States. Through utilizing young adult literature, I want them to begin to recognize the documents of history that have given them the freedom they have today. I want to make what I am teaching important to their future. If they learn to value their past, they will hopefully begin to appreciate other’s pasts.
I aspire to reach as many different children in as many different ways as possible. To appreciate the background of this unit, one also needs to appreciate the students I teach. When you have students who are virtually monolingual Spanish speaking who read at a second grade reading level combined with sixth graders that read at a tenth grade level, you as an educator have a moral and legal duty to modify instruction to reach all types of learners. Adaptations can be made personally and professionally to reach different learners in your classrooms.
Many of the activities will contain oral reading on my part or group activities which will already help accommodate these second language learners. I do speak limited Spanish, which helps, but at times I will also ask these select children the phrase, Cómo se dice¼ ..en ingles? In Spanish this means, "How do you say¼ ¼ in English? This has been very effective for me currently because the children realize I need their help, I want to reach them, and the teacher doesn’t actually know everything.
The introduction of various topics and styles of children’s and young adult books will help me meet these aspirations of this unit’s outcome. Using a variety of activities will enable different learning styles to shine in my students. Again this variety of reading level materials will help me address the varying reading level of my students whose first language is English and are lower level readers. At the same time, I choose to teach this way because it helps bring out different current strengths and develop new ones in each child.
Content of this unit will be taught through introducing historical documents and how
they affect different people today. By enabling my students to imagine what life might be
like today without the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the Bill Of Rights,
I hope to raise their awareness of the value of being a citizen of the United States.
United State court cases will also be referenced, annotated, and utilized in this unit.
The books they have been found in are listed in the teacher bibliography.
Implementation
Comparison activities, reading biographies, writing autobiographies, creating magazines and time capsules, and interpreting historical documents are all activities and lessons that are included in this nine week long unit. To make it more interesting, I have developed an acronym for this unit and what it includes. My experience has been that if my students have some clue or tool they can use to remember something, they retain more information and it seems more fun to them. To make sense of all this information is going to be T.R.I.C.K.Y., but I want my students to value what they are being introduced to and have some pride and ownership in presenting what they have accomplished. So, similar to the acrostic poems they will create, the acronym of T.R.I.C.K.Y begins with them¼ "T"eenagers.
Weeks One and Two
Weekly Vocabulary: peasant, migrant, page, merchant, chambermaid, Earl, globalization, consumerism, minority, domestic, agricultural, activist, and industrialization.
The "R" of TRICKY will utilize Turn of the Century, Voices from the Fields, and Listen to Us which are all non-fiction books connected with the realistic descriptions of and detail expectations of youth throughout United States history. Turn of the Century is a children’s book that follows the life of eleven children over the last one thousand years. Before reading the book to my students, I will give them a blank timeline (1) from the year 1000 to the year 2000. They will be asked to describe the lives of a child their age during each year on the time line. These descriptions, or lack of them, will tell me how much background my students have or don’t have about the turn of the century. While they are working, I will supply them with some background from the book’s cover about the turn of the century.
The thought process should begin here when the students are asked to think of a life without electricity, computers, or ice cream. One description details the amazement that one young lady has at watching her mother use the new invention, the fork. Things that my students take for granted now were not in the past. The time lines they have completed will be shared and compared with the class. As the book Turn of the Century is read, the students will fill in their time lines with facts or information they find interesting from each century’s characters. After their timelines are completed, I plan to implement a writing activity comparing "Then and Now," and "Here and There" (See Worksheet A). These pieces of writing will compare children’s lives in the books with their own lives. They need to choose one year in history from the book and compare themselves today with the child from that year in the book These comparison charts will be placed around the room to serve as a visual display of timelines that begin to detail their histories.
Voices From the Fields is a book of stories about the children of migrant farm workers. This book will be read out loud and the students will be asked to develop character sketches on four of the children from the book (2). I chose this book because of the vivid descriptions and for the fact that it is a reality that hits home for a lot of our students because their parents or grandparents were migrant farm workers from Mexico. My students will choose one student from the four children they took notes on and write a children’s biography on that child to share with the class.
After the biographies, each student will complete an autobiography that includes their future ideals. The students will be instructed to interview their parents and grandparents to help them recall their early times in their lives. Topics they will be encouraged to cover are their most memorable time, a life changing experience, how their brothers and sisters influenced their lives, and who or what has helped you become who you are today.
Listen to Us is a book for kids about kids. It is a book that depicts the lives
of the world’s working children through the use of realistic photographs and written
accounts of child labor. I plan on using this book as a reference to develop unit
vocabulary including the words globalization, consumerism, minority, domestic,
agricultural, activist, and industrialization. Class discussion will begin on what these
words mean to my students, and if they are confident of any definitions. Following
discussion, we will look up the words in a dictionary, define them, find how they are used
in the reading, and place them in sentences the students create to further their
understanding of the meaning of each word. Mainly due to the fact that this book is
difficult reading, it will be utilized further as a reference for individual students who
are interested in child labor, children’s rights, and what work some children do.
Weeks Three and Four
The "I" of TRICKY will utilize American Childhoods, Hear These Voices, and Magazines for Kids and Teens. These non-fiction books and research materials will again open doors for my students to appreciate similarities and differences of other teens ideals compared to their own. Hear These Voices is a book that I will not use fully. To begin each week, two different teenagers from the book will be profiled.
This weekly activity will include reading about both children, talking about their lives, responding to the author’s accounts of their lives, and how teens in the book have a different reality than my students do whether they live in the United States or a foreign country. These responses will include how it makes my students feel to learn about someone else their age, questions the reading made them think about and what tools we could use to research topics from the reading further (3). Extension of these weekly responses will include setting five, ten, and fifteen year goals and ideals from the date of the lesson to describing how they see themselves in the future. For each future example the children will need to answer where they will be in those coming years, what they need to do to get there, and why they want to achieve that goal for themselves.
Each student will be asked to research people who have overcome obstacles to achieve great things. A springboard to this research will be a five minute video I recorded from the local news in May of this year. It is about a "New Mexico Cowboy" who steer ropes very skillfully although he is blind. I will also encourage them to talk to their parents and grandparents to see if they can find information or a place to start research about anyone they may be personally connected to who has overcome adversity.
After two or three days, if any of the students do not have a "personal connection" they can report about, I will contact community members through our administration, parent organization, or Join-A-School partners. The students will make a poster for presentation (Worksheet B) at the end of the week about the person they chose to spotlight. A book they can also use as a resource this week and throughout this unit is America’s Childhoods. This book tells the stories of children through history that survived child labor, broken families, poverty, death, slavery, and racial violence.
The students will also choose a magazine for teens that they would want to publish and explain why. Here they would need to review the book Magazines for Kids and Teens and choose one magazine they are interested in and write a paragraph explaining why they chose that magazine. They need to find someone else in the class who chose the same magazine or one on a similar topic in class. This supports the idea of "interest groups" and may let the children recognize other students they were not aware of before who share their same interests.
In these small interest groups, they will then make their own magazine with
"departments" they would cover because those topics are important to their teen
friends. The guide Magazines for Kids and Teens is a resource that lists many
different magazines that are published for the teenage audience. I choose this activity to
let the students utilize a form of media that is widely read and published in order to
allow them their freedom of expression and freedom of press.
Weeks Five and Six
The "C" of TRICKY will involve using Understanding American Government, A Kid’s Guide to the Bill of Rights, 21st Century Citizenship, and Children’s Rights. These books and teacher resources will help develop and understanding of the roles they have in government and as a citizen. Activities will include oral reading and written interpretations of the Declaration of Independence, Bill Of Rights, and the legal rights they have as teenagers. Here students will begin to appreciate that these documents are written accounts of what the governments are limited to do, and look at where we would be today without certain amendments to the Constitution. Each class period (block) will decide on and develop reasons for creating a "classroom" Declaration of Independence where everyone is entitled to the same opportunities and abides by the same rules because they are to be treated as equals. This classroom declaration (Worksheet C) will be based on the three main principles of the Declaration of Independence: equality and human rights, self government, and limited government.
21st Century Citizenship utilizes case study methodology to familiarize children with laws and supplies example situations and problems for students to evaluate, act out, and solve through problem solving and critical thinking techniques. The students will be separated into teams and will present activities and teach lessons on their own that illustrate an understanding of how our government affects them and what rights they have gained because of it.
Background and information will be distributed to begin this week’s lesson on landmark cases to end legal segregation. Two cases that will be presented are Plessy vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. Board of Education (4). After being familiarized with these cases, their outcomes, and the effects they had on our history and have on our future, the student activities will begin. Each group of four to five students will be responsible for presenting an interpretation of one of the following activities to their peers (5):
Unfortunately, life isn’t always fair!
Revisiting the struggle to end legal segregation.
Becoming active participants in the democratic process.
What do you believe about responsibility?
The time machine
The student groups will decide how they want to interpret these activities. The
activities are presented in the text in a written format, so my general directions will be
that they need to review the activities together and decide how they will teach the
lessons to their peers. They take on a new role and become the "student
teachers."
Weeks Seven and Eight
The "K" in TRICKY will rely on the books American Childhoods, Colonial Days, and Celebrating Diversity Through Multicultural Literature. I plan on using these books as springboards to foster the thoughts of optimism and opportunity in my students. Celebrating Diversity Through Multicultural Literature is a teacher resource book that selects titles of age and subject appropriate books that will address such issues as Spanish exploration, colonization, and slavery.
The issue I want to focus on during this part of the unit is slavery. This teacher resource again develops vocabulary for the unit from each chapter of the book The Slave Ship. The Slave Ship is a fictional story of a young African boy forced into slavery. This resource’s activities are separated into a synopsis, historical and cultural background, pre-reading activities, discussion questions, and integrated activities for the young adult novel. I chose this book because it is the only assigned reading within the unit that is fiction. Again, I am trying to reach more children and give them more avenues for discovery.
Colonial Days is a resource book that I would like to use near the end of the unit to help my students discover the past through projects, games, and recipes. Here my students will get to make marble designed paper similar to that made in colonial times, play the game of jackstraws, and make butter. I hope these activities, while fun, will also teach my students to be thankful for what they have today and realize things that they may take for granted.
Activities for this week will also include designing a time capsule. Students will choose token keepsakes that are important to them to be their contribution to their time capsule. These keepsakes will each have an explanation attached to them. Students must say why it was important for this item to be included in the capsule. These explanations should illustrate who they were, are, or want to become. Their magazines, autobiographies, pictures, and anything else they have completed for this unit may be placed in the time capsule. I have high aspirations of burying the capsules and having the students come back and open them the year they graduate from high school to validate for themselves how they have changed.
Week Nine
The "Y" in TRICKY will again utilize the books Hear These Voices and 21st Century Citizenship. To complete this unit, I want the students to focus on themselves. Activities will include documenting and expressing things that are important to them through poetry and verbal expression. Acrostic poetry will follow the theme of TRICKY. Each line of the acrostic poems will begin with the letters in their names at the left margin starting each line of the poem. Then the students will create poems that describe their history and what they aspire to become utilizing the rights they have (Worksheet D).
As a way to interpret the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence, the students will be asked to interpret all three written documents in their own words. 21st Century Citizenship includes activities that will help them accomplish this. To help analyze the First and Fourth Amendments as they relate to the rights of students, pairs of students will be assigned one of the following cases to interpret for themselves and later the class:
Search and Seizure – New Jersey vs. T.L.O. pp. 294-295
Freedom of Expression – Tinker vs. Des Moines pp. 296-297
School Newspaper Case – Fairfax Co. School Board vs. Gambino pp. 298-299
Student Free Speech – Bethel School District vs. Fraiser pp. 300-301
Oral presentations on these cases will be presented to the class by the pairs after
they have studied them. Posters will conclude the unit and illustrate their ideas of why
the think it is "TRICKY" to be a teenager comparing a time in history to now. As
an extension to this unit, each student will be responsible for beginning to research a
person from history who resembles them in some way and for developing a biographical
sketch of that person. To be assessed on the biography, the students will need to choose
ten topics that they feel are necessary to include in a story of someone’s life.
NOTES
(1) Turn of the Century Timeline – take notes on each character as your teacher reads.
1000 - John, a peasant boy
1100 – Elanor, a student
1200 – Geoffrey, a page
1300 – Rhys, a merchants son
1400 – Alice, a chambermaid
1500 – Samuel, a ship’s boy
1600 – Annabelle, daughter of an Earl
1700 – Roger, a Massachusetts boy
1800 – Rebecca, from Kentucky
1900 – Emily, from Pennsylvania
2000 – John, a California boy
Voices From the Fields Character Sketches – Choose to further describe four of the children from the book using the format below.
1. Name, age, home life, daily chores, wants and aspirations.
2. Name, age, home life, daily chores, wants and aspirations.
3. Name, age, home life, daily chores, wants and aspirations.
4. Name, age, home life, daily chores, wants and aspirations.