Questions of War

1. Connecting Students to Critical Issues through Sunrise Over Fallujah Presented by Dr. April Nauman & Dr. Durene Wheeler Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago Questions of War

2. Introductions & Partners (Partners receive different colored cards.) • Sunrise over Fallujah: Many Possible Pathways • Teaching Literature: Strategies vs Activities • Before Reading: Raise Interest & Prior Knowledge • During Reading • Guided Listening for Comprehension • Questioning: FAQs • Cast of Characters Chart • After Reading • Organize for Readers’ Theater • Extending • Minorities & the Military • Why are We Fighting in the Middle East? Outline of Our Talk

3. MANY POSSIBLE PATHWAYS

4. We learn reading strategies to read books; we don’t read books to learn reading strategies. Teaching Literature: Strategies vs Activities

5. Strategies are cognitive operations that improve reading engagement and comprehension. The goal is for students to internalize, transfer, and flexibly use these strategies. Examples are: • Predicting • Inferring • Making connections to text • Determining important information • Summarizing/synthesizing • Visualizing • Questioning • Metacognitive “fix up” strategies Strategies (reading, comprehension)

6. Activities are what we do with our students in class to help them learn and practice the reading strategies. For example: • Teacher think alouds • Literature Circles • Partner reading • Reader’s Theater Classroom/instructional activities also often include tools, such as graphic organizers, note-taking techniques, etc. Activities (classroom/instructional activities)

7. Strategies • Listening • Summarizing • Questioning • Activities • Listening Game • Teacher Read-Aloud with Partner Turn & Talk Summary • FAQ sheets (also a tool) strategies & Activitiesfor myers’ sunrise over fallujah

8. What are your students likely to know about _______ (the Iraq war)? “Activating” vs. providing prior knowledge • Activate • Personal connection (Do you have a relative or friend who served or is serving in Iraq or Afghanistan?) • Agitating question (“What would you do if another country invaded the U.S.?” “Do you think we should still be fighting in Iraq?” “Do you think we should have invaded Iraq in the first place?” etc.) • Photographs, videos, other visuals (Show and have students journal their thoughts and feelings about what they see.) • Anticipation Guide Before Reading: spark interest & Prior knowledge

9. Provide (a.k.a., “frontload”) • Show documentaries and/or movies (resources are in your folders). • Invite a veteran or current service member to your class to tell about his or her experience and to be interviewed by students. • Read aloud from newspapers, newsmagazines, or books, pausing to explain and discuss. • Label maps and play Internet map games. Before Reading: spark interest & Prior knowledge

10. INTEREST & PRIOR KNOWLEDGE Reading books such as Sunrise Over Fallujah (i.e., narratives, fictional or biographical) can be considered part of knowledge-building for further learning on a specific topic (in this case, events in the Middle East). Aesthetic reading helps connect more students to particular content. It also works as a motivator: the more knowledge (and personal connection) a person has to a subject, the more interested he or she is in it.

11. Reading comprehension involves hearing the author’s words in your head—listening to the author’s voice. • Listening well requires you to focus and quiet the noise in your head (kids have a lot of noise in their heads!) • The “You Said…” listening game with partner • Teacher read aloud (initial letter). Before reading: • Tell students to practice listening well. • Let students know that they will be turning to their partner after the reading to summarize the letter—i.e., tell their partner about what they heard. *Adapted from Lisa Donahue’s Guided Listening, 2007, Pembroke. Guided listening for comprehension*

12. Read aloud

13. TURN & TALK SUMMARIZING The teacher picks a card color (randomly or intentionally) to designate which partner talks first. Remind students that they’re simply telling each other what they heard during the read aloud. After the first partner summarizes, the other partner fills in any “missing” information—whatever he/she recalls that the first partner left out.

14. TURN & TALK SUMMARIZING, cont’d Ask for one or two volunteers to summarize for the whole class. This way, you can correct any misinformation, and everyone hears again what’s happening at the beginning of this novel, which sets the stage for further reading. You might also have students write down their summaries.

15. Explain that, as a class, we will compile one list of frequently asked questions per chapter to help other students (e.g., struggling readers, younger students, students with limited English, etc.) read this book after this class is finished with it. Explain the FAQs will be exactly that—a brief list of the most frequently asked questions. Explain that the questions should be ones we can reasonably and quickly find the answers to, which means the questions will be mostly factual and about unknown terms and vocabulary. Questioning with faq sheets

16. Review your own questions to ask the class to decide which best fit that criteria. Distribute the FAQ sheet for Chapter 1 (with 2 to 3 questions and answers to “get the kids started” and space for students to add questions). Partner read (one page switch-off—reader finishes a sentence that goes onto the next page; “side saddle style”): Pause after each long paragraph or each few lines to write down questions you or your partner realize you had (the partners work on one list). Questioning with faq sheets, cont’d

17. Partner read

18. After reading the chapter, partners review their list of questions and decide which 3 to 5 questions would be most frequently asked by other students. Partners then merge with another pair, and all four students compare and discuss which questions should be on the FAQ sheet. Then, as a whole group, come to consensus on which 3 to 5 questions should be added to the Chapter 1 FAQ sheet. Ideally, students then work in pairs or triads to find the answers to their questions on the Internet. Questioning with faq sheets, cont’d

19. Each pair works to create a “Cast of Characters Chart” to keep straight the multitude of characters introduced in Chapter 1. Characters can be placed in a hierarchy by rank, with a phrase of description after each name (see chart in your folder). Whole class then contributes to a single definitive chart (teacher then Xeroxes and gives a copy to each student for their Fallujah Folders). CAST of Characters chart

20. READER’S THEATER Sunrise Over Fallujah screams Reader’s Theater! After the first or first two chapters, take the time to stage a Reader’s Theater. Make sure everyone has some part in the production. Students work in pairs or triads to write different scenes (depending on how many scenes you want to use), find props, create the stage, and play the roles. (Consider having an “understudy” for each part, though the many roles are small. This helps avoid problems occurring with absenteeism.)

21. After reading the entire book, ask partners to identify and “nominate” 3 important scenes from the book, to be enacted (which can be filmed, if you have the equipment). You decide which scenes will be included (enough scenes so that all the students in your class have a role in one scene). The scenes can involve varying numbers of students—from two to ten. The groups are to work cooperatively on the script, staging, and performance. Allow students to choose their own groups with minimal intervention from you, when possible. Invite other classes and teachers to the show! After reading: Reader’s theater

22. Extending: minorities & the military

23. Extending: minorities & the military

24. Question of Military Academies as Tools of Recruitment Number of Academies Lack of Discipline Among Youth Dwindling numbers of recruits The Matter of CHOICE Extending: minorities & the military

25. Timeline Activity • Partner Picture Walk: Partners walk the timeline together looking at and talking about the photos and pictures at each point. • P • & Ten Things Americans Need to Know About ___________ Extending: Why are We Fighting in the Middle East?

26. Each partner pair receives two to three 1-page descriptions of an event on the timeline. (Teacher can differentiate by choosing which description pages to give which students). Partners read the descriptions, figure out where they go on the timeline, then go hang them there. During this activity, teacher walks around the room to answer questions and talk with students about what they’re reading. NOTE!!! There is only one description per year on the timeline. Each description goes directly below the year. Don’t just look at the years mentioned in the descriptions—you have to match the description to the year based on the event itself.

27. Time line Activity, cont’d Partners then “present” their description pages to the class, standing beside their pages and telling what happened (not reading the page, but also not formally summarizing—just talking through it). This should go fast! As partners “present,” the rest of the class sits ready to write down any bit of information that seems interesting to them (with timeline year and names of the “presenters”).

28. EXTENDING: Researching More on Why We are Fighting in the Middle East Students choose which events or countries to learn more about and work in pairs or triads. Each student in the pair or triad is responsible for finding and/or reading at least one article from the Internet on the topic chosen. Students work in triads, pairs, or individually to create “Ten Things Americans Need to Know About ______________” pamphlets/booklets, with one statement per page accompanied by some graphic, picture, or illustration. (These can be hand-made or computer-made.)

29. Donahue, Lisa (2000). Guided listening: A framework for using read-aloud and other oral language experiences to build comprehension skills and help students record, share, value, and interpret ideas, Pembroke. http://www.defenselink.mil/ http://www.census.gov/ http://www.pbs.org/teachers/ Quinn, Therese & Meiners, Erica (2009). Straightening Unruly Bodies through Military Education, pp. 13-28. In Flaunt It! Queers Organizing for Public Education and Justice. New York: Peter Lang. bibliography