Choose a 4th-8th grade book that could become the basis ...



A good book for eighth grade that can improve student’s abilities to read fluently and their ability to think for themselves is Swallowing Stones by Joyce McDonald. In this book, we learn of Michael and his friend Joe, who wander into the woods during Michael’s birthday party to check out the rifle Michael received from his grandfather, only to pull the trigger and have the bullet hit a man far away who was up fixing his roof. Through the entire summer, they spend their time trying to hide the gun while still trying to maintain a calm face as the police search the town to try to track down the killer. Michael drops his interest in his girlfriend, befriends a different girl who doesn’t expect anything but friendship from him, and spends his evenings getting closer and closer to the family he has harmed until he eventually decides its not worth hiding and plans to turn himself in, but meets the daughter of the man he killed instead.

The book ends without anyone knowing what happens to Michael after he meets the daughter of the man he killed, so there is a lot of opportunity after the book has been finished to allow students to discuss and develop their own points of view and debate gun control laws. Since most eighth graders do not know what a debate really is, it will require modeling, which may require two teachers who know each other well enough that they can argue either side of the issue and teach their class how to find both points for and against the argument they choose.

Reading will occur in the classroom for the most part, students taking their turns at reading a paragraph or two at a time to allow the good readers and the slower readers an equal chance to develop the skill of reading to the class.

Reading fluency is, however, the main reason to choose this book for an eighth grade classroom. In addition, to read it and appreciate it best, it should be done in several ways:

1. A packet needs to be put together by the teacher that includes new words and vocabulary that the students will need to find in each chapter. Ideally, the students will find the word in the chapter, write the sentence it appears in, and then give a definition in their own words. This allows students to learn to find out what words mean when they do not have a dictionary, and is a skill that is needed in the real world as people read about different ideas that they may never have had presented to them before.

2. A written journal entry for each chapter will be kept with a question specifically being asked to provide at least a half of a page on a question that relates to the reading. This will encourage them to be able to explain in their own words what they are thinking about the book as they read it.

3. Discussion questions will also be provided for the students to talk about and take notes to be able to evaluate other student’s ideas about the reading.

4. A book report will be required after everything has been read, with multiple options for providing it to allow for multiple intelligences. (Lane)

5. Besides chapter quizzes, there will be final evaluations of the understanding in groups during a debate about gun control laws. It will require additional research, which will come from the Library, who will have a package of materials they have available from both the school and the town library on the topic, and the two packages of books and magazines will need to be tracked and kept in the right packages.

Information on each item, in detail:

The vocabulary packet will have words that are found within the text of the book. If possible, it would probably be best for them to be in order and to have the page number for each word listed after it so the students have less looking to do to locate them and come up with definitions. Learning to define these words from the text and comprehending what they mean will make it much more of a challenge to some students, so it may be a good thing to allow small groups of 2-3 to collaborate. However, we want them to be able to understand each word, so the actual definition of comprehension may be important to give to them before we start reading.

Webster's Collegiate Dictionary offers this definition: "capacity of the mind to perceive and understand." Reading comprehension, then, would be the capacity to perceive and understand the meanings communicated by texts. (Wilhelm)

This also means we need to follow the entire process for comprehension:

• Activate prior knowledge, and connect the applicable prior experiences to the

reading (if students don't have the requisite background knowledge about a

topic, they will be unable to comprehend)

• Set Purposes

• Predict

• Decode Text — identify word and sentence meanings

• Summarize — bring meaning forward throughout the reading, building on

prior information to create new and fuller meanings

• Visualize — see characters, settings, situations, ideas, mental models

• Question

• Monitor understanding - the most salient difference between good and poor readers is that good readers know when — and often why — they are not comprehending

• Use Clarifying and Corrective strategies where needed

• Reflect on and Apply the meaning that has been made to new situations (Wilhelm)

Journal entries for each chapter will allow the students to both reflect on the previous reading and look ahead to try to understand what will be coming in the future. By keeping it in a journal we will provide the students with a study guide they make themselves, with their written opinions and the discussion questions and their answers for part three. This will give them a simple booklet to look back on and understand what they have read, why some things happened, and will hopefully fill in any portions of the reading they did not understand.

The book report will be done by a rubric, but done individually. They will have many options: they can hold a book talk like a television interviewer, they can make a dust cover for the book, complete with their own blurbs, they can be interviewed as a character from the story, or they can provide a written book report. More options will need to be made available, once a full consultation of multiple intelligences gives a chance to elaborate on them.

Finally, each chapter will have a written evaluation based on the discussion questions and the journal notes, along with vocabulary questions to show continued knowledge and the ability to apply the new definitions in other situations than the ones in the book.

In addition, a full study in groups, probably breaking the class into four or six groups, of the gun control question will occur. Hopefully they will come up on one side or the other, because it would probably give us the best debate if they had to argue the opposite of what the group felt was their opinion on the topic.

REFERENCES

Lane, Carla. The Distance Learning Technology Resource Guide. “Multiple Intelligences.” Retrieved 2/2/10. .

O’Bannion, Kerry. . “#3218. Swallowing Stones by Joyce McDonald Unit Plan.” Updated 9/27/04. Retrieved 2/3/10. .

NOTE: This is written for High School students and may need to be broken up and modified for Junior High students. It also is set up for a block schedule and has the Louisiana Standards.

Wilhelm, Jeff. SCHOLASTIC. “Understanding Reading Comprehension.” Retrieved 2/3/10.

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