Ideas for Making With Every Drop of Blood Pop?

[Tamara J. Fetzer]

Hello Everyone,

My name is Tamara Fetzer and I am an English Secondary Education student at Aurora University. For one of my education courses we have been asked to devise unit on a topic in our field of study. I am teaching a unit on James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier’s With Every Drop of Blood. My target grade level for this unit is middle school. I want my unit to coincide with a history unit on the American Civil War. So, I would like my students after reading this book to have a basic understanding of why the Civil War was fought. The book provides a few of the main perspectives of that.  I would also like students to have a general understanding of how people felt and what people thought about the war. I would like them to make a connection with the war that is going on in their lifetime. I have considered teaching this book in a more student driven literature circle style. I have found three discussions on the Ning, Question: Alternative to Lit Circle Roles?, Making Group Work Pop - Pt. 2, and Discussions That Pop that would be helpful with this. Some resources that I have found on the Internet about literature circles are: Literature Circles Resource Center, Web English Teacher.Com, and Literature Learning Ladders. A resource I have found about assessment is: Social Studies Project - With Every Drop of Blood, which is a commercial for a movie that students had to make. It helps put into perspective the age of students who generally read this book. And while it is not a completely historically accurate resource, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman: The First Circle Pt. 1 provides a relatively accurate portrayal of racism in the United States just after the Civil War, which will help students grasp the two main characters feelings towards each other. I would appreciate any additional information anyone else has on either this novel or teaching novels in conjunction with a history unit.

Thank you all so much for you help,

Tamara Fetzer 

[Ryan Goble]

Here are some good comics resources on the Ning for the Civil War - esp A House Divided

[Tamara J. Fetzer]

Thank you so much!

[Ryan Goble]

You might also check out COMICS: American & World History Ink

RRG:)

[Ryan Goble]

Plus - this has nice Civil War Character Cards, and this one has nice civil war photographs (lots of creative writing you can do with images - see the info in this article - see these three paragraphs from this ASCD article (#2 directly to photos)

Align your objectives. My colleagues and I spent hours trying to create quality learning opportunities to fit various student needs, only to be mired by mushy goals and unclear objectives. This forced us to return to the drawing board to ask the big, hard questions: Why are we really teaching this? What goal does it satisfy? Is it a key part of the curriculum? What do we truly want the students to gain? Will the clever and creative activities we planned lead to significant learning?

To answer some of these questions, we needed to be sure that the tasks were leading to the desired outcomes. In one instance, we developed a multigrade-level project for creative writing that directly responded to district and state objectives. These objectives are assessed by new statewide tests, so the alignment of tasks and objectives was essential. With the mandate clear, we collaboratively wrote activities that would result in assessable learning. These activities offer students progressively complex writing options from a sequential menu. The resulting continuum is a built-in path to differentiate both content and process for a class with diverse needs.

In a typical lesson, each student selects a picture from a file of newspaper, magazine, and journal photographs to provide a writing stimulus. Then the teacher offers different writing options to different students, allowing each student to work on the same overall objective but at an appropriate readiness level. The materials for this project, called A Picture is Worth . . . Many Words, includes at least six creative writing activities in each of ten separate writing categories: setting, character, dialogue, tone and mood, personal response, action and sequence, main idea, simile and metaphor, contrast and compare, and picture composition. Additionally, the materials include several short- and long-term writing ideas that link to language arts genres other than creative writing.