My methodology will draw upon the techniques I have been using to promote literacy in second and third-grade inner-city classrooms: shared reading with predictions, reactions, and retells; interactive writing; webbing and story drafts; parent involvement through student-designed questionnaires and writing based upon them; peer editing, conferencing, publishing and book making; taping of works in progress and of published works; a public reading of finished work.
The challenge is always to find ways of drawing students into new material. We know that asking students what a story reminds them of can open discussion. Children are often eager to tell without prompting. We know about drawing upon prior knowledge and linking personal experiences to the story at hand. All of this helps the student understand, in the words of Margaret Mooney in Reading to, with and by Children, that “reading is the sharing of meaning. It is interaction between the given and the receiver. Reading is the creation and recreation of meaning” (2). What is trickier is the understanding and creation of images, of metaphors.
Illustrations in picture books help students access content. A recent study of comprehension theory, Mosaic of Thought, by Elllin Keene and Susan Zimmermann, reminds us that pictures give students the sensory images that make the text come alive (128). It is for this reason that they want to illustrate their own stories with drawings, to expand them in ways that their language is not yet capable of.
There are techniques that help students move into a text, thereby expanding their language. Teaching students the process of how to infer and to visualize can help them make connections. It can help them to move into new material by drawing upon what they know. It can offer them the challenge of inferring from the illustrations or of imagining from the pictures made by words. Mosaic of Thought and another compatible study, Strategies that Work, by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis, are filled with suggestions and reflections about how to use these techniques in the classroom.
Chapter Eight in Strategies that Work, is filled with specific techniques and lessons for filling in information that is missing from the illustrations or that is not made explicit in the text. For example, the teacher can make a chart with two columns: On one side is a quote from the book or a description of a picture; on the other side the children record the information that they think will help them with the meaning (107). Or one column can be labeled “What We Can See and Observe” and the other “Inferences/Interpretations” (113).
In Mosaic of Thought, Keene and Zimmermann describe a class in which one of them thinks out loud about images suggested by an author’s text that is not accompanied by illustrations: “I tried to be as detailed as I could in my think-aloud, and tried to include sensory images from the hearing, tasting, and touching realms as well as the visual” (129). Some of the students began to do the same. “I challenged them to hear, touch, taste, and smell, but mostly to pay attention to the emotional content of the images” (130). By using short passages from texts that do not have illustrations, image-awareness can be developed in students.
The lesson plans below will apply some of this theory to the materials presented in the unit. The pattern will be a reading followed by discussion and then writing. Sometimes there will be a hands-on activity to help activate feelings and language. By the end of
Nuestra Isla
, the students should be able to take a few sentences and expand them with sensory detail and with feelings, embroidering them as a fibre artist would do, embellishing them as would a musician, a poetor a writer of clear, evocative prose. In doing so, not only will
la isla
acquire more reality so that, like Abuela, they too may refer to it as theirs, “
nuestra isla
.” Their own language will acquire more reality as well.
