Home PublicationsL&LIssuesVolume 27 (1999-2000) April (No. 7)

Online chats help students share their own stories of loss and survival in response to quotations from a survivor’s memoir. Find out how to adapt other popular books for your classroom. Students also can create their own extension activities.

Further Classroom Applications of Contemporary Books

My classroom community of readers and writers is continually challenged, captivated, and connected to contemporary books and formats that have proven appeal to the book-buying public. Why? Because as an adult reader for pleasure and information myself, I share my own book discoveries with my students in the same way I share them with others in my converging literacy communities.

Therefore, when I browse at an online bookstore, order Tuesdays with Morrie, and read it in one sitting, I immediately order it for at least seven sensitive souls in my contemporary family book circle and read selections from it to my classes. Ditto, Angela’s Ashes. This best seller and childhood memoir of former teacher Frank McCourt is inherently appropriate for teacher–student sharing, because it is about a teacher–student relationship over time.

Another strategy to identify choices certain to captivate students is to choose those that center on family or friendship relationships. Kernels of these best-sellers can be shared with the students in the form of quotations/excerpts to prompt responses about student, family, or friendship experiences. These can generate multigenerational, multimedia dual journals (mothers/daughters, fathers/sons, grandparents/grandchildren, boys/girls, online electronic galleries, etc.).

Titles that surface on the best-seller list close to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are perfect for classroom use. These often are books filled with personal testimonials, photographs, and quotes about family relationships. Because of their usually lush designs and broad spectrum of images and words, they often act as perfect catalysts and models for student discussion and writing. Catch crossover children/young adult works that not only surface on best-seller lists but rise to the top and linger! Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go, which I personally was never enamored of, appears on the best-seller list almost every spring. As a result, my students read it aloud. It inspired them to produce their own literally “resonating” multimedia presentations detailing their own life travails and triumphs. They also created a Web page with comments from older siblings who enjoyed the book. (Note. This Web page is no longer available for viewing.)

Author J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (which will be made into a film by Steven Spielberg) immediately invites students to generate their own hypotheses as to why this young adult author’s work fascinates adults and the secret of its crossover sequel allure. They can check out their hypotheses through online surveys and e-mail messages and visit Rowling on the Scholastic Web site (www.scholastic.com). A Web page, guest book, book-specific trivia, and retellings of the Potter series from different perspectives can be potential online extension activities.

The hard-cover best-seller list often serves as a preview of future movie blockbusters and television features/miniseries. The paperback best-sellers are usually reissues of these hard-cover titles to “cash in” on their feature film release and/or television sweeps showings. Ironically, a few of the paperback best sellers are even “novelizations” of successful film scripts! All of these best-seller categories offer rich student storyboarding and multimedia reading, writing, viewing, and listening opportunities, as students can prepare and predict screen treatments of these works or create a novelization of a successful film script or series with the embellishment of desktop publishing. And, students can watch the movies after their releases and compare the original works, their predictions of the screen treatments, and the actual screen treatments, Who knows, a potential William Kotzwinkle (the creator of the novelization of E.T.) or Oliver Stone may be inspired by these projects!

Speaking of inspiration, popular series such as Chicken Soup For The Soul, Having My Say, or On My Own, as well as biographies of people who have overcome tremendous odds to triumph in their personal and professional lives, can be used to comfort and inspire students. They can be prompted to share their own life affirming experiences using the same formats. As a real-life bonus, students can share these experiences with the publishers of these series online for potential inclusion in future works.

No discussion of contemporary book/classroom ties would be complete without a click to the online “concept bookshelf.” Interactive, blank journals (e.g., Grandmother Remembers, Baby’s First Five Years, Writer’s Notebook, My Life) can serve as templates for student lifelong writing. Adult, young adult, and children’s formats are readily usable and easily assigned to a certain grade or grade range. Minibooks, letters, stories, postcard collections, and oversized books can inspire similar student formats and designs. Multimedia and desktop publishing capacities can support a concrete, classroom, virtual training ground for students in book marketing and design. Harry Abrams, publishing, here they come!

Whatever grade you teach, “up” grade your students to the books for adults. Excerpts, quotations, concepts, and themes derived from these works can ensure that the circle of readers, writers, and book-centered talkers is full of today’s classroom learners.

Student-Generated Extension Activities: On My Own

• Buy up a batch of these books. Distribute them to bereavement societies and give a supply to hospital cancer wards so that when families leave after a loss, they have something to begin to help them.
• Give out quotation sheets with some explanation about Sadie’s and Bessie’s lives to our families and those of the recently deceased. Some funeral homes, neighborhood churches, and community centers might be willing to give out the quotation sheets.
• Encourage readers to write to Sadie, so she will realize how important and helpful her feelings on paper are in supporting others who deal with loss.
• Write to Sadie on our own to tell her about how we didn’t guess how old she was or who she had lost. Tell her about our project.
• Ask the guidance counselors at our school to give out or use the book or quotations to help students here deal with death and dying. Almost everybody has lost someone recently.

Visit www.harpercollins.com for more information about Sadie and Bessie Delany’s books. And, read the quotes I used to inspire my students in this project.

Quotes

From Delany, S. L., & Hearth, A. H. (1997). On my own at 107: Reflections on life without Bessie. New York: HarperCollins.

p. 4 time alone to think...spoke quietly to Bessie “spoke to Bessie...crocus plants peeking through the snow...”

p. 6 “This being alone is hard. For the first time in my life, I don’t have you by my side...it’s like I’m just learning how to walk.” “...you’re not there to do these things with me.”

p. 12 “I started wearing one of your suitcoats -- you know, the gray one you loved so much. It made me feel good, having it wrapped around me.” “it’s harder to be the one left behind than the one doing the dyin’.”

p. 18 “I’ve been your other half... It’s like a married couple. You kind of merge into one person after a while.”

p. 19 “I’m still receiving mail for you...and it always makes me feel a little bad.”

p. 20 “I’m learning that I am a separate human being. For the first time in my life, I’m learning that.”

p. 21 “Stop talking about it -- do it now. The world is not going to wait for you.”

p. 24 “The Spring reminded me, life goes on.”

p. 27 “If you had really wanted to, you would have kept going. You wouldn’t have left me here alone.”

p. 33 “Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night calling your name.”

p. 40 “You were a part of my life since I was two years old. I don’t remember life without you. I can see your face in every memory from my own childhood...Yes, you were always there. And now you’re gone.”

p. 63 “I’m so grateful for each and everyday of your life. You used your time well.”

p. 66–67 “You can never really prepare for something like this [the death of a loved one] in part because I guess you don’t want to believe it is happening and in part because it never happens the way you think it is going to happen.”

p. 69 “They’ve made dying a lot harder these days.”

p. 73 “There’s a lot of sorrow, but there’s a lot of happiness, too.”

p. 74 “You can worry yourself to death about something awful happening, and it’s a big waste of time.” “Maybe I’m stronger than I thought I was.”

p. 88 “I put your picture [on the dresser] ... so that it’s the last thing I see at night and the first thing I see when I wake up.”

p. 96 “It also bothers me when things happen, like somebody is born or dies, and you’re not here to share it.”

p. 97 “Sometimes there’s events in the news, like elections and things, that make me very much aware that you are not here. You would have commented on them, had an opinion.”

p. 99 “Now I’m learning how to make it on my own.”

p. 105 “I’m learning that I have to speak up. I used to let you speak for both of us.”

p. 114 “... a thought of nature’s cycle of life, death, and returning life. She found peace and beauty in the knowledge that ...[the deceased’s] flowers would be reborn next year.”

p. 124 “Keeping busy is as important as having companionship. ... It’s having a sense of purpose. A reason to get up every morning...”

p. 124–125 “I just retell our stories to the ... relatives and friends... I think they’ll remember us, and our stories, long after we’re both gone.”

p. 125 “I’m finally able ... [to] talk about you... I like to tell stories about you. For a while I couldn’t talk about you, but now I can. It makes me feel good. It’s like having you here beside me again.”

p. 134 “it occurs to me that I did get over Mama’s death!...”

p. 136 “I have your permission to keep on living and try to be happy.”

p. 143 “Somewhere along the line I made up my mind I’m going to live... I think I’m going to be all right.”

p. 144 “I believe it’s up to each person to make the best out of life, to keep trying no matter what. A lot of it is how you look at it. A lot of it is attitude. ... Don’t worry about me, ... child, I’ve got plans.”

Copyright © 2000, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). All rights reserved.