Thanksgiving Break Lesson

My district was going to have this Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving, but then the district bypassed mediation with our unions and created a new schedule for the rest of the year, which included many more furlough days.

In Sheltered Language Arts, we had just finished up a 3 day lesson where students jigsawed a myth about Hera (we're just beginning Greek Mythology....) then drew their part and explained it to the rest of the class. I found myself with one awkward day before the Thanksgiving Break.

Never one to allow a lesson in colonialism slip by, I decided to do a lesson involving an excellent picture book: The Rabbits by Shaun Tan. Tan is an amazing illustrator who is also responsible for The Arrival, a beautiful wordless graphic novel about immigration and community. While The Rabbits is specifically a story about the colonization of Australia, the story is about every country where colonizers oppressed and displaced indigenous people and built fundamentally unsustainable societies.

This is a great book for high school ELLs because it brings forth complex questions through beautiful illustrations and terse, poetic narrative. Having already discussed colonization a bit when we read the short story "The Eclipse" by Augusto Monterroso, I knew that my students had been exposed to the concept and some vocabulary (colonize, invade, indigenous, oppressed). There is one spread in the book about colonizers pulling indigenous children from their homes, which was a nice tie in to the educational issues we have been discussing in Intermediate ELD.

Also, before we read The Rabbits, we read this little printable book that I found online. It is from a teacher's site and meant to be used in elementary school. It is very basic, but I think it gave students a good way to compare the picture book to what young students in this country might usually be learning about before Thanksgiving.

Sheltered Language Arts classes are generally supposed to be for students who have reached at least an intermediate English level. I work in a very small district that doesn't have solid systems set up for supporting ELLs, so I also have 6 newcomers who have very little English. Two Vietnamese newcomers have stellar academic skills and spend a lot of time translating every word of long texts in an effort to keep up with a class that is not designed for them. (I do try to create alternative or modified assignments and assessments for my beginners as often as I can.) I asked one of my most advanced Vietnamese speakers to go through the picture book again and translate the words into Vietnamese. This was one of my favorite moments in the classroom so far this year. A bunch of other Vietnamese students gathered around, and would interrupt or add something in or laugh as the reader interpreted the story. He was also clearly explaining the concepts at each page the way that I had in English. It was a beautiful thing to end the school week on before our holiday and furlough days.

Students had to answer three questions after we read together. They are almost always allowed to work with each other and use dictionaries or smart phones or whatever in this class. We work with Costa's 3 "levels" of questioning, which you can read a little more about here.

Question 1: What is Thanksgiving?
Question 2: Do you think you are more like the Rabbits or more like the Speakers? Why?
Question 3: What do you think elementary school kids should be taught about Thanksgiving at school? Why?

Here are a few examples that made me feel good about the lesson. I'll leave it completely in their words, no corrections.

"In 'The Rabbits,' do I think it is more like speaker because when the readers read this story, the imagine to Indian and European. They went to North American and bring more advances to Indian. But they also begin invades Indian country and harm to environment."

"I will teach them the right thing how the white people kill the Indians."

"Well I think I'm like squirrels because I'm from the other country were the white people start making trouble." (this student is from Micronesia)

This is from an Eritrean (East African) student who has very little English: "The white people is come to North american is dirty." I include this to show that although beginning students may not understand or be able to express as nuanced or specific an understanding of complex topics, but that doesn't mean they can't understand or express the major themes.

"When I read and understand the story I think I'm more like the squirrels because I'm sure about that I'm not like the rabbits." (I love this because I feel like it shows the way that we can feel "othered" and be uncomfortable identifying with oppressors, but not really know where to go with that.)

"I like the speakers. Speakers are pure and friendly. The rabbits are very mean. They build more building destroy environment. Before it is a nice place but after they came, nothing nice. All is bad. Speaker can't see they change their environment so speakers had fight to rabbits. Rabbits are eccentric, very cruel, and dogmatic." (That last line is a great example of how an electronic translator can work out well. I see plenty of examples of how it can get in the way too...)

"[The rabbits] have a viciousness, and they industrialize that country. But they are demolish the natural. They start racial discrimination to get war."

This is from a student of Mayan and Mexican descent: "I'm more like the speakers because the rabbits invade they country without take care or see how the environment...this same thing happen to the state where I live...I think young students should learn that the Thanksgiving is not a good thing because when they came they destroy the forests, all most all the natural things, they brought diseases. I think people not only need to show them the good things also they need to know the bad things."

Obviously, students respond in different ways too. One beginner wrote that on Thanksgiving we "don't go to school. I like it I can sleep many hours." Was this a wasted lesson for him? I think no. Even if the texts only gave some students reading comprehension and writing practice, it was a success in my mind.