Language Objective: I will say and write sentences that compare and contrast toy ads using important C&C vocabulary
Learning Objective: I will consider (think about) the ways companies use gender to sell toys
(1) Read the objectives for the day. Explain "ads" and "advertisements."
(2) Break students into groups of 3, with mixed languages as much as possible.
(3) Explain that we'll be writing sentences that compare and contrast toy ads that show boys and toy ads that show girls.
(4) Gender recap: Since all the students don't have Language Arts with me, I wrote up "sex" and "gender" and went over the differences between those.
(5) Give each group a couple pages of toy ads (Fred Meyer, Target, Toys R Us). These are easy to find, they are always among those sheets and sheets of ads in newspapers.
(6) Tell students we need to come up with a list of words that we will probably use when we're writing about these ads. Get them started with "feminine," "masculine," , "maternal," "girly..." then each group has to pick two words and add them to the list. Our lists ended up including things like dolls, cars, cooking, weapons, guns, violent, cute, pretty, tough, and creative.
(7) Put up a sentence frame. Each group has one sheet of paper and needs to complete the sentence frame together with one person writing.
(8) Call on groups for 3-4 examples for each sentence frame, then move to the next one.
(9) In the end, I asked if anyone wanted to put their ad on the doc cam and share anything they saw, and a couple groups did have some more things to say.
When I redo this, I will try to get more speaking practice in before the groups write, or make them do some "Give One, Get One," type things where they move around the room and actually have to speak.
Here are some sentences groups came up with using the sentence frames, I won't correct anything:
These blue toys encurage boys to masculine, whereas those pink toys encurage grils to feminine.
The toys that are shown with boys are weapons and cars whereas the toys shown with girls tend to be about beautty or babbies.
The toys that are shown with the boys are powerful and masculine, whereaes the toys shown with girls tend to be feminine and cute.
These weapon toys encourage boys to be violent, whereas those fantasy toys encourage girls to imagine.
The advertisements for girls toys have to do with how to pet a dogs; however, the advertisement for boys toys are about heroes and cars.
The advertisements for girls toys are home aplaneses [appliances]; however, the advertisements for boys toys are game, car, and killing zombies. P.S. Thes toys are very sexist.
It was a pretty fun day. For tomorrow, I've typed up some of the sentences with common mistakes for us to practice correcting.
The hard thing about having a target that guides your curriculum is that you have so many amazing topics that you could be using. Other great Compare and Contrast units could be built around guiding questions about racism, social services/taxes in different countries, sustainability, indigenous issues and colonization...the list could go on and on. The hardest part is focusing your topic enough that students get repeated practice with the same group of academic vocabulary words.
See, you are teaching exactly what you want to be teaching.... and who better to benefit than ELL students! Keep up the good work!
ReplyDeleteMy compare and contrast sentence of the day: Both Chiapas and Puebla have higher volcanoes than Mt. Hood.
Mexican pride and nature, see those are two of my favorite topics.
Insightful anecdote of my teaching day... It's time for the book Lewis Cardinal's First Winter. You know the little bird is trying to figure out exactly how he should be for his first winter and nothing seems to speak to him as he checks in with all the animals. As I bring out Solomon the Raven (the big black felted bird) one of my squirrely kindergarten boys shouts, "it's the bad guy". "No, no I say, they are all kind characters and this bird is very wise/smart. Why did you think he is a bad character?" the boy shrugged and then a girl chimed in and said "it's probably because he's black." Topics of color/race coming out through children's lit. so interesting!