Posts tagged ‘gold’
114. The Gold Coin by Alma Flor Ada
Retell: A thief discovers a woman who claims to be the “richest person in the world.” He ransacks her hut but fails to find her gold. He goes on a quest to find the woman and her gold. What he finds instead are people who teach him that being rich has little to do with gold.
Topics: gold, greed, thieves, kindness, hard work, acceptance
Units of Study: Character, Social Issues, Talking and Writing about Texts
Tribes: mutual respect
Reading Skills: prediction, interpretation, inference, empathy
Writing Skills: incorporating the rule of three
My Thoughts: I first discovered this story when I went to a Great Books training years ago. I’ve since used it a few times during the Character unit. It is a great text for examining how people can change because of their relationships with other people. It’s a great text to use when you are launching whole class conversation during and after read alouds.
109. Encounter by Jane Yolen
Retell: An account of Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of the Americas told from the point of view of a Taino boy.
Topics: Christopher Columbus, explorers, gold, Taino, trade, slaves
Units of Study: Nonfiction, Historical Fiction, Content-Area
Tribes: mutual respect
Reading Skills: interpretation, envisionment, inference
Writing Skills: using figurative language
My Thoughts: Yesterday was Columbus Day and to celebrate, here is one of my favorite Columbus Day read alouds. Since the story is told from the perspective of a child, students will be able to relate to how powerless the boy feels. He warns his people not to trust the “strange creatures” that were “spat out of the canoes”, but no one listens to him. This is a fantastic text for teaching inference. Yolen takes great care not to use terms that would have been foreign to the Taino people. Readers must constantly infer what the boy is describing. For example, Yolen describes beards as “hair growing like bushes on their chins”. When Columbus claims the island for Spain she describes how people “knelt before their chief and pushed sticks into the sand”. It’s important to model how readers constantly consult the illustration while reading the text in order to construct meaning.
Teachable Texts 