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What universal experiences do all refugees share?
In this, our first serious unit, students read the book Inside Out and Back Again as the central text for learning about how all refugees experience the tragedy of life twisting inside out, and how only the "Lucky Few" ever enjoy life coming back again.
We link this novel with a series of news articles, Ted Talks, and documentaries to learn about refugees' experiences across countries and decades. |
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Daily Descriptions
Thursday 9/12/2019
Today's lesson is intended to develop schema about refugees. (Basically to help the students understand "big picture" ideas about what refugees go through.) We'll start with a gallery-walk protocol during which students react to powerful images of the Vietnam War. (This year, responses will be tracked in a Google form to assess text complexity and prevent copying.) In these two lessons intended to develop schema about refugees, we'll start with a gallery-walk protocol during which students react to images of the Vietnam War. (This year responses will be tracked in a Google form to assess text complexity and prevent copying.) |
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Sadly, our word cloud is incredibly vague. In a gallery walk filled with tragic images of escape and pain, the most commonly used words were "people," "like," "trying," "helicopter," and "looks."
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Friday 9/13/2019
Despite less than ideal results yesterday, our students learning will go on! Today, they'll examine some data about yesterday's observations. They were not great - few specific words. To remedy this, they'll do a mix and mingle protocol to discuss sentences that describe yesterday's images, then they'll refine yesterday's observations using some of the new, specific words the sentences provide. Finally, they'll start reading our first text: Inside Out and Back Again. |
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Daily Descriptions
Monday 9/16/2019
Close Read Protocol |
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Close Read Tools
Observation / Inference Graphic Organizer Reading Process Bilingual Pages 4-9 Bilingual Pages 10-31 Data
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Tuesday 9/17/2019
Ha is the main character of Inside Out & Back Again. She is a young girl who experiences great changes that make her think about who she is, where she comes from, and how those details will help make her who she wants to be. As we begin reading Inside Out & Back Again, we will reflect on who Ha is. To deepen our understanding and connect Ha and her experiences to ourselves, we will reflect on who we are. We will create a Google Slideshow with five slides that show who we are through images we choose to represent important parts of ourselves. |
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Wednesday 9/18/2019
Close Read Protocol |
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Thursday, and Friday 9/19/2019-9/20/2019
It's "Identity Box" round two! ...honestly, though, the "box" is in fact a Google Slides presentation, because it would be incredibly hard to find a Papaya tree in Dunkirk Middle School room 208. It would be even harder to fit it into a literal box. Today we'll make the connection to the text Inside Out and Back Again by creating an identity box for Ha. Today's assignment will be a bit more rigorous than Monday's with specific observations from the text, and corresponding inferences about Ha's heritage, family, symbolically significant objects, and passions. |
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Daily Descriptions
Monday 9/23/2019
Close Read Protocol |
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Tuesday 9/24/2019
The goal of the mind-mapping protocol is to make categories and connections between words. There is no “correct” way to make a mind map, the goal is to organize the words logically in a way that makes sense to you. Effective mind maps should include all the words, and some of our dialectic note symbols.Don’t forget, words can be organized to face different directions, into different shapes, symbols, etcetera to enhance meaning. The expectation is 90% on-task behavior: All eyes looking at the vocab strips and the growing mind map. All voices contributing thoughts, questions, and insight. Two languages being spoken, and respected and valued equally. All hands touching and moving vocabulary sentence strips. All group members under three feet away from the group’s mind map at any time. |
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Wednesday 9/25-2019 - Friday 9/27/2019
Over three days, students will slowly watch the documentary linked above and slowly refine how the refugees' and the sailors' perspective impacts the reality of the escape from Saigon for the refugees in the documentary, and by extension, for Ha, the main character in their central text. |
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Daily Descriptions
Monday, 9/30/2019
Evidence Accrual Day Lesson Plan |
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"Inside Out": Difficult Assignment
"Inside Out": Assignment "Inside Out": Easy Assignment Writing Tools |
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Friday 10/4/2019
Students will start with a highlighting activity based on the NYS, 4-point rubric. The goal of this activity is for students to be able to evaluate one another's, and by extension, their own work as effectively as a teacher by the end of the school year. After the highlighting activity, there will be a brief explicit instruction activity modelling how to assess student writing at each score point (4,3,2,1, and 0) followed by a Plicker-based response-card evaluation activity to ensure students can effectively evaluate writing. After the response-card activity, students will perform a chalk-talk protocol during which the will walk around, evaluate, and offer actionable, evidence-based feedback on their peer's first quick write. |
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Daily Descriptions
Monday 10/7/2019
Close Read Protocol This week, we'll start two new levels of refugee study:
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Tuesday 10/8/2019 - Wednesday 10/9/2019
Today, we'll use an amazing web resource provided by the U.N. (and found by Ms. Davis.) Students will read through, and choose a refugee's story from the site linked above. Based on that refugee's story, they'll use our dialectic annotations to find evidence of the refugee's life twisting inside out, and coming back again. (It is perfectly acceptable if refugees' stories do not match Ha's. Our goal is to find out if there are experiences that are universal to all refugee's stories. |
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Thursday 10/10/2019
Greetings! We'll take a quick break from UNHCR.org and continue reading and accruing evidence to demonstrate that Ha's life is coming back again after her ordeal in Saigon. Breaking up our week with a reading day like this serves multiple purposes:
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Friday 10/11/2019
Let's start with today's class for our students. We'll be turning the evidence and explanations we accrued from our UNHCR.org articles about refugees into a beautiful, big, evidence-based paragraph. Students who have excellent explanations written already will only need to worry about writing an effective claim, and adding transitions. We'll use two of my writing tools to help:
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Daily Descriptions
Wednesday 10/16/2019
Today, we continued reading Inside Out and Back again with a very cool, but easy and creative check for understanding: the four lines, two circles summary. |
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Thursday 10/17/2019
Today, we're doing a station activity that represents a tour of refugee experiences around the world. We're using a software called Epic (which sadly, isn't free online) to read about six different countries. Students will then color in the location on a world map, and complete a "notice/wonder" chart based on their reading. Again, while this is educationally important to see how different country's refugee experiences are universal, the map activity and notice/wonder chart are easy for students to complete |
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Friday 10/18/2019
Today's "cut back" activity is our second 4-Corner's discussion! This time students will discuss what is universal, and what is unique about the wide variety of refugee experiences we've read about during this unit. Participating with a single response yields an 80% score for the day, and students can score up to 110% by responding four or more times. Hopefully, this series of engaging, but easy activities will leave students ready to come back on Monday and re-engage with the highly rigorous curriculum we normally study. There are two weeks to go in our refugee unit. |
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Weekly Description
Monday 10/21/2019-Friday 10/25/2019
This week, we'll watch The Good Lie. Depending on the class and the amount of questions and discussion, the movie will take between 3 and 3.5 classes to watch. As students watch, they'll utilize the connection tools linked below the trailer to the right to annotate their learning and eventually, to create the final body paragraph for our essay. *The addition of this movie to our curriculum was in 2019, when students, in last week's four corner's discussion, repeatedly used the word "spoiled" to describe refugees stuck in camps for decades. |
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Essay DescriptionFor this unit, our final essay will answer the question: how does the title of the book Inside Out and Back Again relate to the universal experience shared by all refugees? This essay, like all essays assigned in our class, is differentiated into three levels, for beginning, grade level, and above grade level writers. Below you'll see the tools used specific to this unit that follow our writing protocol.
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Success Skills
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Day 1Monday 10/28/2019
Today we'll work together using the tool linked above to...you guessed it, create baller introductions for once. By the end of class, every student will have an amazingly written 5-7 sentence introduction paragraph for their essay with no less than 5 checks for understanding (peer and teacher) throughout class to make sure we're successful.
In this lesson I will tell you about why you should never start an essay with "In this essay I will tell you about..." |
Day 2Tuesday 10/29/2019
"Organizing and Writing" Day - Ha's Life Comes Back Again.Today students will organize and writ their final body paragraph explaining how Ha's life has come back again. Where relevant, classes will finish reading the final few pages of the book Inside Out and Back Again before starting to write.
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Day 3-4Wednesday 10/30/2019 -
Thursday 10/31/2019 
During these two days, students will finish previously unfinished paragraph prompts. They'll intentionally organize and copy their paragraphs into their final essay document to create a essay weaving all the texts and materials we've read into a unified, or dare I say, universal embodiment of our learning.
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Day 5Friday 11/1/2019
We'll start by modelling how to assess student writing at each score point (4,3,2,1, and 0) followed by a Plicker-based response-card evaluation activity to ensure students can effectively evaluate writing.
After the response-card activity, students will perform a chalk-talk protocol during which they will walk around, evaluate, and offer actionable, evidence-based feedback on their peer's first quick write. We'll end by passing our essays to a peer so that they can improve spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, and offer feedback to move our essay to the next score point. |
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Refugee Connection ToolThis tool helps students to organize their writing in a few ways. It "chunks" the writing process into manageable tasks - finding evidence as they read or watch, and explaining the evidence as soon as they find it, instead of weeks after. By using a clear, table format, it helps students to see the structure of writing because it is literally structured. Also, it makes the writing process less scary, because they've done most of it ahead of time. By and large, when they sit down to write their paragraphs and essay, they can copy and paste their own work, allowing them to focus on the finer nuances of writing.
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Evidence AccrualBefore jumping to making a claim to answer an essential question, it is necessary to review what the texts offer as possible answers. Before making a claim, students complete an evidence accrual protocol. In the classroom, it is set up as a station activity, and at each station students read a meaningful selection from the hundreds, if not thousands of pages of text we read each unit.
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Evidence MineAt this point students find evidence that could support multiple answers to the essential question. All that evidence is dropped into an easily searchable, well-cited spreadsheet. That spreadsheet lives in the image to the left, and the title above. Feel free to click.
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Writing ToolsThe goal of every successful ELA classroom is to help students develop into the best possible writers that they can become. The tools below are what we use in my classroom to help students on the road to above grade level writing and beyond. What matters to my students and their parents are the tools below, and how they're used.
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For this "essay," our easy essay is in fact just two, well-organized paragraphs. We omit the introduction and conclusion paragraph. The "easy" writing differentiation includes transitions and sentence frames for ENL and Special Education students. You'll notice color-coded visual cues in the assignment the correspond with the graphic organizer we use.
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Our grade level essay for this unit requires students to write a four-paragraph essay with the assistance of our writing tools page. They'll have to compare Vietnamese refugee's experience with one additional country's refugees, complete with introduction and conclusion paragraphs.
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Our advanced essay for this unit advances students' thinking by requiring students to write a five-paragraph essay They'll compare Vietnamese refugee's experience with two additional country's refugees, and they'll have to do so with the most difficult texts our unit has to offer.
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Close Read |
Study Materials |
Assessment |
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Most people see refugees and think "wow, he really needs a new shirt," or "she could really use a meal." Melissa Fleming has the opinion that refugees don't need a handout, they need a chance. If you need to make up some work, and watch this, all you need to do is to pair it with one of our close read tools, and you can fill in their missing grade.
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It's easy, as Americans, to say we need to be careful about letting refugees into our country. It's hard to watch this video and to understand why... If you need to make up some work, and watch this, all you need to do is to pair it with one of our close read tools, and you can fill in their missing grade.
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Our world-wide refugee system is horribly broken. Everyone cries about millions of people and dollars and then complains that it takes 25 minutes to get a coffee from Tim Hortons in the morning. Our world has a workforce 25ish million people strong with skills and experience, and we look at them, and send them blankets. Alexander Betts has an awesome dating-app based solution to the refugee "crisis." If you need to make up some work, and watch this, all you need to do is to pair it with one of our close read tools, and you can fill in their missing grade.
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