Photo Credit: Aaron Escobar via Compfight
One of the benefits of teaching many different subjects (as I do in fourth grade) is being able to come back to an idea or a question over and over again. Too often we think of learning happening in neat little packages: I taught this lesson and now I’m moving on to the next one. But learning doesn’t happen in nice, neat packages very often. It occurs in what I think of as seasons, with long periods of fallow and subterranean root development between harvests.
I was reminded of this kind of episodic learning once again this week. We’ve been exploring some questions related to immigration through a wonderful immersion project with a local museum. One of our reading groups recently finished an informational book on Ellis Island, took some notes on its content, and is now working up a video to teach the other kids in the class about what happened there. They’ve written the script and this week they are downloading photos from a marvelous collection offered through a photo stream from the New York Public Library via the Creative Commons.
At any rate, the kids came across many, many photos that looked like these.
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- New York Public Library via Flickr No known Copyright Restrictions
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- New York Public Library via Flickr No known Copyright Restrictions
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- New York Public Library via Flickr No known Copyright Restrictions
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- New York Public Library via Flickr No known Copyright Restrictions
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- New York Public Library via Flickr No known Copyright Restrictions
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- New York Public Library via Flickr No known Copyright Restrictions
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- New York Public Library via Flickr No known Copyright Restrictions
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- New York Public Library via Flickr No known Copyright Restrictions
Then something interesting happened. The kids stopped and stared at the photos.
It turns out that the kids were looking closely and making connections to the drawings from The Arrival, a wordless graphic novel I had used to introduce our immigration unit. Said they, “These look a lot like the pictures we saw at the beginning of The Arrival!”
“Hmm…” I said. And I trotted over to get the book.
You see what you think.
So, then the connections came flying.
“Those people in The Arrival are definitely immigrants!”
“They look almost exactly the same as the drawings!”
“I wonder if the author saw these photos and drew the pictures from them.”
“Now we can see where the immigrants are from!” (The country of origin is in the notes on the Flickr account.)
So, maybe this connection between our reading of The Arrival and the New York Public Library’s photo stream isn’t the biggest thing that ever happened. But since our first interpretation of that page of faces from The Arrival was “Those look like terrorists!”, we have come a long way!
I think the struggle we went through to understand the drawings helped set the students up to not just KNOW that many different immigrants came through Ellis Island, this struggle also helped them OWN that difference in a deeper way than if I had told them from the outset, “No, those are not terrorists. They are immigrants.”
I saw those pictures and immediately thought of The Arrival. I’m so glad the students saw it too. It’s beautiful when all of the pieces fit into a lovely picture. They got it! Your patience paid off.
haven’t started The Arrival yet. I’m reading a Long Walk to Water. Really powerful. Wondering if The Arrival would make sense as a follow up.
I haven’t read Long Walk to Water, but it is on my reading list. Do you think it would work with fourth grade? While our ability to focus through longer books is good–at least for some–for others it is still difficult. I’m managing that by layering longer and shorter text for read aloud, sometime even using figures, maps, graphs, and photos (or poems and 1-page articles, as short text) and then working on a longer, really “meat-y” text between times or over the top of these other texts.
I liked THE ARRIVAL because it was wordless, so the effort of following it was lessened, but it was still very idea-dense, so the thinking could go deep. While longer, it operated in the classroom as a shorter text because it took less energy to for the young and the restless to create the images from words.
Focus can be a problem and your mixing of long and short text is wise. A Long Walk to Water is relatively short, but there are a lot of shifts in time and perspective. The place and culture are extremely foreign which has forced my students to pay attention to setting. There is also an issue of who is the bad guy. It might be a stretch for your fourth graders. I was worried for my group, but there is action (war zone) and lots of wonderings along the way. This helps with engagement. For fifth I thought it was a risk worth taking. Fourth maybe not.
Check it out though, it is very quick. You could get through it in an afternoon.
Thanks for your thoughts about LONG WALK, Julieanne. Those are the odd kind of things that we think about when choosing a read aloud. Very helpful. I’ll read it as soon as I finish up Elijah of Buxton, (and Colin Woodward’s AMERICAN NATIONS, a nonfiction book for me, not the kids!)
Way cool connection!
Yes, Mary Lee, it was a fun moment! You can’t script those, but I have to believe they are created by rich content and the opportunity (and space) to think.