Top Ten Toolkit Set 2: Text and Strategy sets for culturally diverse classroom

Culturally Diverse Learners Text 1 of 2

Morales, Yuyi, and Tim Meara. Viva Frida! New York: Neal Porter, 2014. Print. 

My first text is called Viva Frida. It's a picture book that is both in Spanish and in English, and is created by this great puppet artist, Yuyi Morales. The book doesn't tell very much about Frida Kahlo's life, but it is a good example of a culturally relevant, ELL appropriate book for learners of all reading levels. Each page has about 1 sentence or less on it, and in the background it has the Spanish words, as you can see below. It's also a great example of a picture book that helps kids to read pictures, which helps them to later use words to tell a story. For my graduate project, I'm reading The Power of Pictures: Creating Pathways to Literacy Through Art by Beth Olshansky, which talks about using high quality picture books to develop decoding skills in kids. Though I'm using this one for engaging diverse learners and ELLs, Viva Frida could also be used for struggling readers due to its short, digestible phrases and detailed pictures.Viva Frida not only references Hispanic culture, it also features gender diversity. The teacher can use the book to supplement a lesson on the life of Frida Kahlo who, in addition to being a famous female painter from Mexico, also challenged gender roles during her life.

This book is a text that I will use for my unit on narrative self-portraits.

 

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Culturally Diverse Learners Text 2 of 2:

 Ringgold, Faith. Tar Beach. New York: Crown, 1991. Print. 

Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold was brought to my attention by my teaching coach one day. This is a book that features a young African American girl and her family who live in New York. Some nights, they go up on their apartment rooftop and spend the evening looking over the New York skyline. Cassie, the little girl, imagines that she can fly and goes about solving her family's problems as she flies through the night sky. This book delves into joblessness, poverty, and a child's need for control over their lives. I think it's a great book for a population that deals with poverty and feelings of powerlessness everyday and it's also appropriate for struggling readers, once again, because of its vivid pictures and simple text. I teach a unit on quilting for my middle school kids and Faith Ringgold is a well-known quilting artist whose work can help illustrate the possibilities of story quilts for my kids.  This is a simple book that deals with complex problems faced by children who deal with poverty and I think its simplicity makes it approachable for all ages of children.

 

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Culturally Diverse Cultures Strategy 1 of 2:
It Says- I Say chart

This strategy helps kids search for clues in their books about that will help them to make inferences about the text. It encourages them to think differently about a question instead of relying on a blatant answer in the book which also encourages critical thinking. This also builds confidence in the learner by teaching them to interpret or rely on their brains rather than just searching the text for a canned answer. This strategy further encourages students to put the text into their own words so that it is more understandable. Essentially, this strategy helps students to break down interpretation into 4 easy to answer prompts which lead them to come to their own conclusions to answer an external question.

Step 1: What's the question
Step 2: It says (write down what clues the text gives you)
Step 3: I say (students reason based on the clues)
Step 4: And so (students draw a conclusion based on these two factors)

It says, I say is appropriate to use when students are having difficulty interpreting/comprehending text in order to answer questions and can't seem to use the text to gather evidence to use for their own inferences about the questions.

This strategy, again, is good for both critical reading/literacy and for culturally diverse learners. Culturally diverse learners may not have had exposure to critical thinking in their homes. Therefore it is important to give them scaffolding to develop this skill- leading them to become independent readers. This strategy encourages learners to draw on background knowledge as well, further building confidence.

I would use this strategy in my classroom to help students process artist biographies and also in order to interpret biographical works of art- like Frida Kahlo's paintings which include a lot of symbolism about her life. For example, the other day we were looking at Frida Kahlo's "Self Portrait with Monkey." This painting features a monkey which is symbolic of her issues with addiction. It would be helpful for students to interpret her painting by going back and reading her biography and using that text as evidence to interpret the symbolism of the monkey in her painting.

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Culturally Diverse Cultures Strategy 2 of 2:

Anticipation Guides

Anticipation Guides are a tool for front-loading students for reading a text. The guide asks difficult questions that make students use their own prior knowledge to anticipate what the text is about and to take a stand or form an opinion on issues that they'll later confront in the book.

This strategy would be appropriate for culturally diverse learners because it has them draw on their own experiences to relate to the text. Their cultural experience is important and a means of relating and better understanding the text and as well as relating to the text, they can relate to other class members through the class discussion before even reading. Anticipation guides can be used throughout the text to see if the text is influencing the way students think.

To make the Anticipation Guide, teachers must ask questions without obvious conclusions to stimulate discussion in the classroom. Another way to do this might be the classroom 4 corners guide where a question is asked and students go to one of the 4 corners of the room (A, B, C, or D) to state their response- or the spectrum approach where they stand on one of two sides or in the middle and then questions are asked about why they're standing in that particular space- the movement is perhaps better than a worksheet for kinetic learners.

I would use anticipation guides in my classroom when introducing children's book writing to my 8th grade class. I would introduce one children's book per day, and it might be helpful to introduce various cultural versions of the Cindarella story. Mofara's Beautiful Daughters, by John Steptol was mention by Beers, but I could also introduce The Rough Face Girl, by Rafe Martin and The Egyptian Cindarella by Shirley Climo. We could use these books to talk about the story themes like female roles, everlasting love, inner beauty an greed as downfall in addition to the components of a folktale.

This could bring up some interesting ideas about women's roles, what "happily ever after" really means, and some alternate endings that might be possible for the students' own modern folktales.