Hayley CunninghamWOK Humanities- LAP 3

“A Shelter in Our Car”- Monica Gunning

I. Content : Describe what it is you will teach. What is the content?

Students will further their study into homes through the book A Shelter in Our Car by Monica Gunning. Through this book students will make the connection that home doesn’t always have to be a place, but it can also be a feeling.

II. Learning Goal(s) : Describe what specifically students will know and be able to do after the experience of this class.

Students will gain empathy for homelessness. Students will be able to identify that home is not always simply a shelter; it is a feeling- has

emotional ties to it. Students will be able to answer text-dependent questions citing evidence.

III. Rationale : Explain how the content and learning goal(s) relate to your Curriculum Unit Plan learning goals.

This lesson is a continuation on our study of the characteristics of a home. The overarching goal of my unit is to get my students to delve into the deeper connotations of home. Thus far we have explored home as a physical shelter and have begun to delve into home as an emotional connection. The remainder of the lessons will focus on roots being your home as well as community. This lesson serves to provide students with the background knowledge they need in order to build their own perceptions of home.

IV. Assessment : Describe how you and your students will know they have reached your learning goals.

Throughout this lesson, students will informally assessed through means of engagement with the story, participation in whole group discussion, as well as ability to remain on task during the turn & talk and story. Students will be formally assessed during reading as text-dependent questions are thrown to them. After reading, students’ will assessed by means of a writing prompt. Students will be asked respond to: “Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling”. Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?

I will know that students have reached my learning goals if they have been able to identify the emotions tied to a home by explicitly talking about familial relationships. My aim is for them to connect this to Zettie and her mother. Students will know that they have reached my learning goals, as we will have a whole group discussion on the prompt before we begin writing. Students will know my expectations for writing and be able to asked questions for clarification.

V. Personalization and equity : Describe how you will provide for individual student strengths and needs. How will you and your lesson consider the needs of each student and scaffold learning? How specifically will ELL students and students with learning disabilities gain access and be supported?

Students will be supported through a whole-class discussion before the writing prompt. This period of time will serve to give those students who struggle coming up with ideas to be able to

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Hayley CunninghamWOK Humanities- LAP 3

“A Shelter in Our Car”- Monica Gunningcollaborate with other peers for a planning period. According to Gibbons, this allows students to build a bridge to written language: “encouraging literate talk means giving learners opportunities to use the kind of spoken language that is closer to written language and providing them with a chance to “rehearse” this more complete and explicit language in talk with others” (141). This will allow students to be gradually immersed into their writing with support from peers.

VI. Activity description and agenda a. Describe the activities that will help your students understand the content of your class

lesson by creating an agenda with time frames for your class. Be prepared to explain why you think each activity will help students on the path toward understanding.

Time Teacher Activity Student Activity Materials Needed1-5 Minutes Facilitate Discussion:

“The title of this book is A Shelter in Our Car. What is a shelter? What makes something a shelter? What do you think this story is going to be about?”

Turn & Talk:

Discuss predictions

Chart Paper

5-25 Minutes Interactive Read aloud:A Shelter in Our Car by Monica Gunning

P.7: Why did Zettie and her mom move to America?

p. 16: What do you think? Why can’t Zettie’s mother “do some other kind of work?”

p. 19: What do you know about Benjie? How do you know?

p. 25: What will happen next? What will Zettie do?

Engage in story

Answer text-dependent questions

A Shelter in Our Car

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Hayley CunninghamWOK Humanities- LAP 3

“A Shelter in Our Car”- Monica GunningWhat would you do?

p. 30: Why does Mama say, “How would you like to sleep in a bed all summerinstead of in our car?”

25-30 Minutes Facilitate Discussion:

“Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling”. Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?

Filter through turn & talk groups

Promote whole class discussion

Turn & Talk:

“Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling”.

Discuss as a whole group

Anchor Paper

30-40 Minutes Put writing prompt on Elmo

Answer:“Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling”. Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?

ElmoLined Paper

b. What particular challenges, in terms of student learning or implementing planned activity, do you anticipate and how will you address them?

I anticipate potentially having students in my class who might have lived in a car or in a homeless shelter. There may be traumatic experiences associated with that. If this is true, and if students do not wish to participate in the lesson, I will have a Winn-Dixie exercise available for students to complete.

VII. List the Massachusetts Learning Standards this lesson addresses

SL.4.1 Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 4 topics and texts, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly

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Hayley CunninghamWOK Humanities- LAP 3

“A Shelter in Our Car”- Monica GunningRL.4.1. Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

VIII. Reflectiona. In light of all areas of planning, but especially in terms of your stated purpose and learning

goals, in what ways was the activity successful? How do you know? In what ways was it not successful? How might the activity be planned differently another time?

Overall, my lesson was successful. My learning goals were met. For one, my students were able to empathetically reflect on homelessness. Throughout our whole group discussion many students made comments such as “I feel so bad for Zettie and her mom”, “I hope that they find somewhere to live!” and “This book makes me sad”. Not only did they become empathetic towards those who are homeless, but also they became empathetic towards bullying. There’s one instance in the book where Zettie gets bullied at school. I hadn’t planned on discussing it to a large extent, but my students were adamant about bringing it up no matter how many times I had tried to gear away from it. I finally embraced their enthusiasm and we had a 10 minute long student-led conversation about reasons that students may become bullies, what we can do to stop them, what we can do if we’re being bullied and how they’ve encountered bullies at school and their feelings about it. It was an amazing conversation that they were passionate and insightful about. It was pretty amazing that they were so comfortable to discuss such difficult concepts as a whole-class.

In terms of my other stated learning goals, students were great answering text-dependent questions. Their enthusiasm with the book set them up to succeed with this goal, as they were willing to talk about anything related to the book. Students were even able to make text-text connections with the book from the previous lesson, Fly Away Home. Turn and talk was a strategy that definitely worked best for the text-dependent questions. I gave students about a minute to discuss and then have a couple of students share out their thoughts.

Finally, in terms of success with my stated learning goals, students were definitely able to recognize the big idea of the lesson. Many students were able to recognize that home does not always have to be in a physical shelter (their concept of a physical shelter is a house), but it can be wherever your family is. After discussing my writing prompt question as a whole class and after reading students’ written responses, it seems that students understood home to be associated with feelings and emotions. In the writing responses, some students took it a step further and wrote about how home is both a place and a feeling. For example, in student sample 1, Paola was able to recognize home as a place where her belongings remain, but also “where you think about stuff like cooking in your kitchen, or sleeping in your bed”. When talking with her one-on-one, she was able to vocalize her opinion even more, by saying that your home is where your memories are and she made a connection to our first book, Let’s Go Home by Cynthia Rylant. She was able to use the descriptive, visual factors of her home and connect that to emotions and memories to come up with her answer. Sebastian Diaz (see student sample 2) also thought home was both a feeling and a place, whereas Sebastian Delgado (see student sample 3) thought of home as merely a place of memories. Finally, my ELL students also understood the concept as a feeling. One of the Level 3 ELLs in the class, Gilmary (see student sample 4), agreed with the statement saying, “A home is a place where you stay to grow”. While talking with her one-on-one, she elaborated by talking about all the memories associated with home and that home could not be without her mother and sister.

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Hayley CunninghamWOK Humanities- LAP 3

“A Shelter in Our Car”- Monica GunningIn the end, no one disagreed with the statement, which shows me that students are exactly where

I want them to be in their understanding of home. Every one was able to state that home is connected to feelings and that homes can have happy or sad memories. If I were to ask students this question 3 weeks ago, many students would have disagreed with the statement. During the first week of the unit, when I asked students what is a home, no one understood it as a place of feeling or belonging. They only viewed it as a house. Now my students are able to understand the emotional ties connected to a home and hence will be able to extend their knowledge next week when we view home as an emotional connected to the community.

In the end, if given the opportunity, the only thing I would change about this lesson is the time frame. This book had so many great small moments in it that I would have loved exploring deeper as a whole class. A lack of a time crunch would’ve allowed me the freedom to do so.

b. What did you learn from the experience of this lesson that will inform your next LAP?

From this lesson, I learned that my students are able to have insightful conversations about difficult topics. If the book is of high interest, I am able to hold their attention and have a whole-class discussion. I found in previous lessons, if students are not interested, they will shut down, fidget, or misbehave. I also found out that my students are able to successfully answer text-dependent questions through turn-in-talks. It gave students more accountability rather than me asking as a whole-class where only a few hands would go up. I will definitely utilize this technique in the coming lessons and choose high-interest books.

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Hayley CunninghamWOK Humanities- LAP 3

“A Shelter in Our Car”- Monica Gunning

Appendix

Student Sample 1:

Student Sample 2:

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Hayley CunninghamWOK Humanities- LAP 3

“A Shelter in Our Car”- Monica Gunning

Student Sample 3:

Student Sample 4:

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