Melissa B. McCarty
The students will be grouped in a book group, listening group, or a video group. The book group will be my higher reading leveled students who can independently read the Arthur series. These students will have a bin of Arthur books that they will work with and a bag full of post its and highlighters. Their jobs will be to search for clues within the books on how Arthur is feeling and how they know. They will write the feeling word on the sticky and stick it on the page. Once they have gone through the book, they will chart their findings on chart paper in the same format we had been writing during shared reading the previous weeks.
Each student will have his or her own color to indicate which student did what work.
The listening group will meet in the listening center during the reading block. This group will be made up of mid to high levels of students. Their job will be to listen to Arthur stories and notice when Arthur's feelings change. How do they know he is feeling differently? They will write down what is happening at that point of the story. (His feeling and then how they know, as charted below.) The students may stop the tape when they notice a change in Arthur's feeling and discuss amongst the group what their thinking is.
This work will be displayed on the bulletin board underneath the title of the book the group listened to.
The film group will be my lower level group who will watch Arthur books on VHS during the reading block. Here, they will watch Arthur and notice if his face changes, or his body changes when he feels a certain way. (For example, when Arthur feels worried, he sometimes has a "worried look." Which means his eyes get bigger, his mouth is open in an O shape and he sometimes slouches.) This group will have additional work to go along with noticing the character's feelings; they will have to write down the scene in the movie, and the characters' reaction/feeling to the situation in a two-column chart set up the same way as the other groups.
I will be meeting a lot with this group and stop the tape at times to ask the group, "How is Arthur feeling here? How do you know?" If I am not able to meet with this group, the special education teacher will take over for me. This group will be assessed by an oral description of the character and participation as well as their final drawings.
To close the unit, this group will take a feeling card from a basket, and draw Arthur looking that way. The feeling cards will be pre planned and will be "feelings" and "reactions" Arthur had experienced in the films they have viewed. Each student will take a card and draw Arthur's face and body according to that feeling/reaction. To challenge this group I will also ask each one of them, "When do you remember Arthur feeling this way? What was happening? What story was it?" I will do the recording of these answers for them. I will write it down under their picture. The pictures will be displayed on a bulletin board along with everyone else's work that was done throughout the unit.
∗At the end of the unit, the groups will present all of their hard work to the class, as well as to other students from other classes who would like to see what being a good reading detective looks like. Each group will get an allotted time to present what they worked on, what they noticed about Arthur, and how inferring helped them to become better readers. This will be another form of assessment for me along with their post test that they will complete after the presentation. ∗