Teacher Notes
This WebQuest was designed for middle childhood students, depending on their development, between the grades of four and six. The first step of the WebQuest is to have your students read the novel, Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry. Students must read this novel in order to gain the proper schema that is needed to participate in the WebQuest and fully understand the roles involved. Students should work on this project mainly in groups or independently. Exploring the WebQuest independently or in peer groups allows students to feel more independent, which yields a better outcome for this project. This WebQuest should take approximately seven to fourteen forty-minute class periods to complete.
This WebQuest includes evidence of a:
Middle Childhood Literature Collection
In order to view the middle childhood literature collection associated with this WebQuest, visit the Author Study section. The middle childhood literature collection includes novels written by Lois Lowry that are appropriate for all young adolescents between the grades of four and nine.
Language Arts Lesson
There are actually two language arts lessons associated with this WebQuest. One language arts activity is how to create a journal based on the perspective of someone who lived in Denmark during the Holocaust. Students must review various websites and think about questions related to these websites in order to learn more about what it meant to live during the Holocaust. Then students must take what they learned and apply it to the creation of a journal entry from the point of view of that person who lived during the Holocaust. This activity is aligned with the Ohio English Language Arts Content Standards for grades four through nine. A second language arts activity included in this WebQuest is that students will learn how to make a newspaper based on the events that occurred in Denmark during the Holocaust. Students should take what they learned about the Holocaust from completing the journal activity and pull out all of the important information to place in the newspaper. Students will research what a newspaper looks like, what a newspaper should include, and take information about what they learned and use it to create a newspaper of their own. This project involves both cooperative learning and writing process activities. This activity is also aligned with the Ohio English Language Arts Content Standards.
Mediated Reading-Thinking Activity
In order to view the mediated reading-thinking activities included in this WebQuest, visit any of the following pages:
These MR-TA activities emphasize guided silent reading. I divided the sections of reading into manageable chunks of texts that they could read silently. Then after each manageable chunk of reading, students must stop to think more critically and responsively about what they read. During the MR-TA activities in this WebQuest, students are encouraged to predict, or anticipate what might happen in the readings. Then they must read a selected part of the text silently and respond to the text by answering questions about what they read. Finally, students must connect the new ideas that they learned about in the text to what they already know. Students are then given the opportunity to reflect on what they learned by creating a journal entry from the perspective of the character that they learned about in that section of the WebQuest.
Word/Comprehension Plan for activities
In order to view the word/comprehension plan for this activity, visit the Glossary section of this WebQuest. In this WebQuest, there is a section of difficult words about the Holocaust that students may not be able to understand. The Glossary section, defines these words with an understandable definition and, in some cases, includes links to websites on the Internet where they may be able to learn more about the difficult word. By reading the definitions in the glossary, students will learn more about the Holocaust and its importance to this activity.
Author Study
In order to view the author study, visit the Author Study section of this WebQuest. This author study is designed for students in investigate an author individually or in small groups, whatever is appropriate at the time. The important part of the author study is that students have a connection to the author, Lois Lowry, and her writing. In the author study that has been created in this WebQuest, students must visit websites about the author and read additional facts about the author. Students must then write a brief biographical sketch about the author, answering the following questions:
By completing this short assignment, students should have a better understanding of the author, her works, and her writing style.
This WebQuest is designed to work in the following settings:
Readers Workshop Plan
This WebQuest is designed to work in a readers workshop environment. Before beginning this WebQuest, it may be helpful to read the novel, Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry, in book clubs. A book club approach has four components: reading, writing, discussion, and instruction. The reading component involves silent reading, partner reading, choral reading, oral reading/listening, or reading at home. Students should have ample time to read so that they can be prepared for sharing what they read when the book clubs meet. Second, the writing component involves students reflecting on what they read. They should draw or write in their journals in preparation for the book club meetings with other students. The discussion component involves students interacting and learning from others in both their book clubs and community sharing sessions. Finally, the instruction component is when the teacher provides opportunities for students to learn what and how to share their ideas with others.
A good way to help students begin to work in book clubs is to divide the students into groups of four or five. Students should work in their book club groups to plan how much of the book they will read per day and set a date for the completion of the novel. Students should typically meet in their book clubs daily. A good introductory activity is for the teacher to read the first chapter of the novel aloud, using a mediated listening-thinking activity. This activity is similar to the mediated reading-thinking activity described above. On the following days, students will read on their own. After each students completes their reading for the day, he or she will prepare for the impending book club meeting with his or her peers. Students should think about important events, questions they may have, characters, illustrations, words or phrases they may not understand, or something personal that they took away from the story. Students should then meet with their book club members. They should share their responses from what they read, discuss main points of the text, clarify points of confusion, make connections across and within texts, relate ideas from text to personal feelings, experiences, and prior knowledge, and identify the author's purposes and critique success at achieving those purposes. Book clubs provide students with the opportunity to monitor, pace, and evaluate thier own work and work toward becoming more mature readers. Organizing students into book clubs also requires students to participate in community sharing sessions. In these sessions, students will listen to the views of others and take turns in discussing what they read in whole-class sharing sessions. Book clubs are an excellent way to bring students toward becoming more independent learners.
A good way to organize the class period when having students work in book clubs is in a readers workshop format. In a readers workshop format, students begin the day as a whole group. In this first section of the day, the teachers should provide minilessons on things that students may have difficulty understanding and talk about workshop and book club procedures. Students and teachers should lay out the plan for the day during this time period which should last approximately ten to fifteen minutes. The first activity during the second section of the day should be a quiet reading periods. Students should read silently for at least twenty minutes. During this time, the teacher should either read along with the students or hold conferences with each book club group to see what problems they may be having with the novel. The second activity in the middle section of the day should include students working on reading response activities. At this time, students may think about what they read and write in their journals, share and discuss in their peer book clubs, or work independently on projects involved with the reading. The teacher should provide question and answer help during this time of the day. The middle section of the readers workshop should take approximately thirty-five to fifty minutes. The last part of the day is set aside for community sharing sessions where students talk as a whole-group about what they learned from the novel. Also, students should evaluate how they worked during the day and plan what they might do tomorrow. This section of the readers workshop should take approximately ten to twenty minutes.
The readers workshop format works well when students are reading the novel, Number the Stars because it gets students to think and work independently before they must begin their WebQuest. Also, the readers workshop atmosphere allows students in the class to be working on the WebQuest and other students to be finishing up their reading at the same time.
Writers Workshop Plan
When the students begin to work on their newspaper assignments, this allows for a great time to implement a writers workshop plan in the classroom. In order to create the newspaper, students must work in cooperative learning groups and go through most of the steps of the writing process. In order to organize the class period into a format that would allow students sufficient time to work on their projects, students could be involved in a writers workshop within their book club groups. During a writers workshop, the day is split into three sections. During the first section, the students meet as a whole-class. The teacher may provide a minilesson on an area of writing with which the students may be having difficulty. Then the students plan what they will do that day. During the second section of the day, students will have either individual or group writing time, whichever they find necessary. Then students should confer and talk within their book clubs about the project. They would reflect on what they have already accomplished and think about what they need to do next. Also, during this section is time set aside for editing and publishing if needed. Finally, the last section of the day requires large group sharing sessions and thoughts on what may happen the next day. The entire writers workshop format would work in both a forty or a sixty minute class period.
The writers worksho format works well when students are creating their newspaper projects established by this WebQuest because students are given ample time to work independently in their groups, but the teacher still provides help through minilessons at the start of the period and question and answer help during the actual writing process.