"The Great Big Book of Families"
How did you prepare?
After seeing this book at the library, my partner and I immediately fell in love with it. As we read the story, we wrote up a few questions we could ask our students. After, we thought of the idea to have students make their own book about their family. We started working on a template, and completed a lesson plan to go along with it.
Explain the objective(s) and assessment measures of your lesson.
The main objective of our lesson was: students will be able to create a booklet using three topics discussed in the book, “The Great Big Book of Families”
Students were asked to complete a six page booklet which included:
On the first sheet, they will have their “Cover Page”. The students will illustrate what their family looks like on this page. On the second sheet of paper the students will draw a picture of themselves and write the following underneath: “My name is ___. I am ___ years old.” The third, fourth and fifth pages will have the same sheet of paper, but the students will be given the choice to choose any three of the twelve topics, discussed in the book, to illustrate and write about.
The last page students will be asked to draw a picture of themselves ten years from now. On the bottom, they will write, “Ten years from now, I will be a(n) ________.”
The completed booklets were measured by a rubric which measured the students use of correct grammar, punctuation, completion of all pages, etc.
Was your lesson plan executed exactly as it was written?
Unfortunately, we didn't really get to all pages of the booklet in class. We spent a lot of time on reading the story and asking questions. However, in one of our actual first grade classrooms, in which we are observing for junior field, we were able to get to the booklet and the students loved it.
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What was the most important thing you tried to teach your “students”? How do you think it went?
We wanted to show the students that there are all different types of families who have different cultures, beliefs. customs, clothing, etc. I do believe it went well because of the questions we used for each topic in the book. Students were able to hear things about their classmates that they didn't know before. For example, in the real 1st grade class, one student explained to us what a Bar and Bat Mistzvah was, while another explained Divali.
What did you learn from your students?
Besides the fact that students love to share stories about themselves, and could go on and on doing so, I learned that sometimes students are going to say bizarre and maybe alarming things that as the teacher, you have to pull aside and address. For example, Ivy kept saying she was hungry, and she hasn't eaten, and Colyn used the word "abusive" to describe his family. These things can't be ignored.
What would you have done differently? How could you have made the lesson even more effective?
The only thing I would've done differently was spend less time on reading the book itself, and more time on getting students to create their own book. To make the activity more effective, I would have the students present their books to the classroom, which was also another objective we had.
