I teach middle school language arts. It is my plan to use this as an introductory unit with both grade levels (seventh and eighth) as an opportunity to jump start the year after the summer reading slump and quickly get them engaged in reading. My incoming eighth-grade class will be the students I currently teach as seventh graders so I am aware of their ability levels, their strengths, and their areas of improvement. My incoming seventh-grade class will be mostly comprised of students in our sixth-grade class so my understanding of this population will not be as experiential.
Reviewing the data for my incoming seventh graders, a quarter of the students are identified as multilingual learners. My school is developing a newcomer center to help students arriving in the country with limited English language skills adapt to school before being transitioned into classrooms. I suspect this number will slightly increase. With this in mind, I think offering an introductory text that is visually rich and less language dependent will make that transition smoother than it would by jumping into a language-heavy work. There is a history of using graphic novels to teach English language learners. Prior to 1959, the United States Army used comics to teach non-native speakers the English language.1 In a 2004 study, Crawford determined that independent reading was important to English language development and many students in the study chose graphic novels.2
In terms of cultural backgrounds, my population is mostly students of color with most learners identifying as either African American or Latinx with a growing Middle Eastern population. I think utilizing Native American origin tales will also allow for future opportunities, not detailed specifically in this unit, to explore origin stories of other cultures based on the makeup of the students in the classroom.
The understanding of nature will naturally lend itself to cross curricular studies in other academic classrooms. My school is an environmental science magnet school so this unit will easily embed itself into the school’s magnet theme by providing opportunities to explore the natural world in the classroom. Also, the use of science in the stories will allow my students the opportunities to examine and compare informational and literary texts like in lesson four. Furthermore, there are opportunities for expansion within the social studies curriculum with mapping activities like in lesson five as well exploring Native American culture and history. Because the book not only provides stories from different writers, but it is also illustrated by different artists, there is an opportunity to explore cross-curricular work with the arts department.