This lesson is a bit of a tear-jerker...especially for the first text of the unit.
I always start off this lesson by watching the trailer of Marley and Me. Usually my students are somewhat familiar with the movie, so I wonder about that familiarity this year since it came out one to two years before many of them were born. The movie trailer piques their interest and it is funny so they are usually laughing.
Then they read the tear-jerker of a text called "Saying Farewell to a Faithful Pal" by the author John Grogan. He was the owner of Marley and writes about the end of Marley's life. It's a beautiful reflection and students often bring up their experiences with their own pets.
Instructional Strategies
When considering instructional strategies, I realized that this lesson is more about introducing a new content than introducing a new skill. I decided to have students read through the essay once without doing anything to it because I just want them to experience it. Then we can go back and analyze it.
We are continuing to talk about finding the best evidence to support a writing prompt, so I created an easy way for students to collect evidence. This will help students of all ability levels because they are able to keep their ideas organized for their essay in the future.
I use sentence stems for writing, especially for the students who have writing goals on their IEP, but I also offer them to other students if they need them.
This text will foster some strong discussions, so I plan to have students discuss in groups before they share out. This way, I can ensure that there is equity of voice in the small groups even if not everyone talks in front of the class. I plan to have students jigsaw the discussion questions because that helps them practice talking with their peers in an organized manner. Each student will have something to share this way.
Another strategy that isn’t necessarily new to my students is collecting text evidence and writing an explanation of what the evidence shows and why it’s important. They did this already with our last novel study unit, so the only difference is the topic.
Addressing Specific Goals
This class only has one student on an IEP. He has a reading and writing goal. We are reading through the story once independently. I will offer him the opportunity to listen to an audio of the text (Perez, 2019). For his writing accommodations, I always offer him a template to write his paragraph.
Use of Technology
My school is 1:1 with iPads, so we use a large amount of technology. The students have a hard copy of the textbook, but I will offer an audio version of the text. They will use a Google Slides template to record text evidence for the end of unit summative essay prompt. Their summative paragraph for this lesson will be completed on a Google Doc. I will post the link to the assignment in Canvas and students will be forced to make their own copy. These are skills that my students already know how to do at this point in the school year.
This highly engaging text usually encourages students to read and discuss. Our goal is to find text evidence, which is a skill that students have been mastering very well so far.
Next step…perfecting how to explain the evidence and connect it to the thesis statement—all while reading heartwarming stories about how animals impact humans.
References:
Perez, K. (24 May 2019). Differentiating Reading Instruction: Multiple Pathways to Success. Solution Tree. https://www.solutiontree.com/blog/differentiated-reading-instruction/.
The College Board. (2021). Springboard English Language Arts: Grade 6. College Board.
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