I chose these books because they are topical for my units of study and this topic is of interest to the students. They know the characters and can use their background knowledge to add to their summary of the literature version (RL.2.2). The shift in Common Core Standards focus asks them to do ‘close reading’ to compare and contrast their story ideas with historical fact. (RI.2.9) as they read and summarize the ‘true’ stories (RI.2.2)
** I tweaked this lesson the second time I taught it because my students were not all familiar with this movie. It was more powerful to show the clips and have students familiar with the story share what happened.
Underlined words below are lesson vocabulary words that are emphasized and written on sentence strips for my Reading & Writing word wall. I pull off the words off the wall for each lesson, helping students understand this key 'reading and writing' vocabulary can be generalized across texts and topics. The focus on acquiring and using these words is part of a shift in the Common Core Standards towards building students’ academic vocabulary. My words are color coded ‘pink’ for literature/’blue’ for reading strategies/’orange’ for informational text/'yellow' for writing/’green’ for all other words)
This lesson is an assessment for my students. I taught these informational summarizing strategies in 3 other lessons - Frame the Story with Informational Text, A Feast of Summaries, and these literature summarizing lessons in Summarize and Make a Movie, Summarize and Make a Scene.
Get the kids engaged
Bring students to a common learning point
Set a purpose for the lesson
Demonstrate the strategies
Follow up discussion
Students who can recount and summarize literature by identifying the main idea (RL.2.2) and identify the main topic and central ideas of informational text (RI.2.2) are utilizing a strategy called 'close reading' which is a focus in the Common Core Skills. This requires students to examine how the text features and details in the text support and lead to a theme or main idea. By comparing and contrasting versions of this story, students are analyzing the summaries and main ideas to see the author's purpose. (RI.2.9) Ultimately, their comprehension will improve as they analyze what they're reading as well as how the author wrote the text and the text structure.
Demonstrate the project
Summarize literature text
Summarize informational text
Check their work as you walk around
Students complete project
Follow up discussion
Scaffolding & Special Education - This lesson could be scaffolded up or down, depending on student ability.
I chose to read the texts to my students because of limited books and because I have special education students. Although the goal is reading, I'm also focused on reading strategies. It would help your students who are struggling to read with you (if the class has separate books) or to work with a reading buddy. The worksheets also require a lot of writing, so again, I would suggest that they work with a buddy or the teacher uses a desk slate to write prompts for the worksheet. Here are the student prompts on a slate that I used.
For students with greater academic ability, it would be more challenging to ask them for greater description ('wanted to find riches' vs 'wanted gold' or 'she died at an early age' vs 'she died'.) They could use some of the vocabulary from the book as well, such as explorer, captured, or colony.