Yup - you read that right! Our wordless picture book unit has been a total hit with students. Anyone, regardless of language, reading levels, abilities, strengths and needs has been able to dive right into the beginning of this unit. The best part? Regardless of their English titles... we've been reading and working with these books in French! We've been reading incredible stories like Chalk by Bill Thomson, The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney, Mirror by Jeannie Baker (if you speak/read Arabic, you'll love seeing this book!), and so many others. Check out the book trailer below for Journey by Aaron Becker to get an idea of how powerful wordless stories can be. The goal of the beginnings of this unit is to learn about inferencing, or making an educated guess, determination, prediction, and developing understanding based on what we know and what we see. What's really neat (and challenging) about inferences, is what actually makes up what we know. Students suggested all the things that influence what they know and therefore influence their inferences. Inferencing serves us really well in MANY ways, for example:
We began learning about this by taking a look at one image from each of those books above. We wrote our observations (what we see) and our questions (what we wonder). Then, we compared our learning and where our observations, questions, and inferences came from on three of the images we studied. We learned that inferences might come from:
Next, we worked on a neat activity where students needed to figure out the definitions of completely made up words based solely on context clues from a short text attached to the word. You can watch these boys try to figure out the word ("un crandidé") on the card on the wall. This made for some in-depth (and hilarious) discussion! Where are we going next with inferencing?
We're moving our unit into a new theme, learning about Canadian residential schools and the Indigenous children who were taken from their families to attend these institutions. We'll be reading the story of Chanie Wenjack using the wordless graphic novel, The Secret Path inspired by Gord Downie's music and illustrated by Jeff Lemire. More on the blog to come!
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