Getting my Feet Wet

I started teaching critical literacy (in its official form) this week. (Obvs we've all been doing it in some form when we talk about point of view or when we regularly discuss the story and deepen comprehension, but yano...)

I used The Giving Tree to start. Interestingly, students didn't make the connection that the tree symbolized the mother, and I had to further nudge them to infer that having the mother and son as the only characters might have been because the author was trying to show that in some cases the mother's whole world is her kid/s (nudge as in I led them there, they still didn't make the leap, so I told them). I figure this is kind of their first exposure, so by me directly telling them is a way of doing a Think Aloud, or mental modeling. I'm expecting that with more and more examples, I will have to nudge less.

Today I showed them the movie trailers (Beth made one cd, so I've got it & you are welcome to it). The students LOVED that and it visually represented to them the concepts that I was talking about. I highly recommend doing this.

After the movie trailers I started reading The Wretched Stone. Before I even started reading, students picked up that the word "wretched" was preparing us for something bad. Also, there is a picture of a sailor on the front cover who looks like he is on the verge of falling off the boat. They picked up on that as also carrying a negative meaning.

I think it's going along great so far! I've got some more things planned, including using some other media as well as more texts. I'll comment more about how that goes later.

Also, I think that it is fortunate this critical literacy discussion is happening prior to the unit on persuasion. We're studying how authors subtley position the reader in our discussions on critical literacy and then students will use some of those characteristics as they think about swaying a specific audience.