Dealing with the English language in its all main domains - speaking, listening, reading, and writing - is an essential part of my everyday teaching. The unit is based on pieces of American literature, and therefore closely correlates with the Reading Comprehension curriculum. The ultimate goal of the unit is for each student to be able to communicate his or her cultural experience to the audience through pieces of writing portraying his or her own distinctive image. In the process of achieving this big goal students will encounter many intermediate objectives. Constructing them, I considered Bilingual Education and ESL Standards for Pre-K-4 Students and CMT Reading Objectives (see Appendix A.). Students will be able to:
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- experiment with expressive forms pertaining to voice (paintings, music, oral presentation of their writing);
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- comprehend, process, and evaluate different modes of conversation and informal writing while reading Latin American writers;
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- evaluate and interpret cultural information from those sources;
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- identify voices of characters portrayed in stories under study;
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- share their ideas, experiences and points of view with those from different cultures;
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- recognize the value of bilingualism and biculturalism and use these appropriately in their interactions with others;
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- extend their cultural awareness through performing and visual arts.
Skills Development:
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- Students will connect the right voice with a statement, a message, or a person and vice a versa through a number of oral and written exercises;
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- Students will depict and describe a piece of music;
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- Students will paint self-portraits;
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- Students will create their final product - a piece of writing - by adapting their experience to audience, culturally-embedded context, and purpose;
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- Students will incorporate their native language in a piece of writing as a component of their voice;
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- Students will assess their own and others' writing pieces using the scoring guide for voice;
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- Students will present their original pieces of writing about their cultural experiences to the audience - other students, their parents and teachers.
