Happy Super Bowl Sunday! I'm sure lots of you are so excited for this game tonight, but I'm not the biggest football fan in the world....so I'm just looking forward to some wings tonight! Today I'm linking up with the Collaboration Cuties to share a Must Read Mentor Text. I've blogged a bit about how our school adopted Pearson's ReadyGen literacy program this year. The BIG downside to this program is that I don't get to choose my own read aloud texts anymore. The upside is that I've truly enjoyed the majority of texts we've read through this program! We just finished Unit 2 Module A, which focused on understanding how people respond to injustice and inequality. Our anchor text was Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, written and illustrated by Kadir Nelson. {This text is available through Scholastic Book Clubs this month as well!} The text is told from the perspective of an older African American woman who is sharing her family's history through pivotal points in American history. Her grandfather, Pap, was kidnapped in Africa and brought to America as a slave. The narrator describes Pap's experience as a slave and the reader is able to understand how many African Americans experienced slavery. The story continues through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Great Migration, World War I, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, World War II and the Civil Rights Movement. This is a powerful text, filled with dialect, figurative language and unmistakable voice. Our shared reading prompted awesome conversation and excellent questioning from my students. Even with a very limited understanding of American History, my students were able to build a tremendous amount of knowledge about slavery and the importance of the Civil Rights movement. Our timing helped as well: coincidentally, we concluded the text just before Martin Luther King Day. To compliment the text, we viewed the full length "I Have a Dream Speech" and the biography channel's mini bio of Martin Luther King, Jr on YouTube. I also have a small group of students working through I'm Lovin Lit's Martin Luther King Jr Timeline Packet (
