Through Their Eyes...

We've been studying Allan Wolf's book New Found Land for the past few weeks. This book is told from the point of view of 14 of the people who joined the Corps of Discovery for Lewis and Clark's historic expedition in search of the Northwest Passage, and the unit is timed to align with the time period that is being studied in American History class. The book is told in free-verse poetry. As we've read, students have annotated, collected examples of figurative language, and used textual evidence to support interpretations and to verify the accuracy of Wolf's version of events. Students are also asked to imagine themselves on the trip and chart their comfort levels while comparing them with those of other characters in the book.

Our two guiding questions for this unit are:

How do we tell our nation's story?

and

How does perspective impact a story?

The final assessment tasks for this unit are:

(1)A Behavior Over Time Graph with Textual Evidence (charting their own comfort levels and the comfort levels of two characters in the book)

(2)An In-Class Essay on the following prompt-Imagine you and an iPod are on the trip. What three songs would you play, and how would they motivate the characters?

(3)A Poem that imitates Allan Wolf's style and tells the story from the perspective of one of the artifacts collected on the journey.

A student plans the introduction for his in-class essay

For FUN...two students re-created the map of the expedition...on Lemon Bars!

 

Students work together to sort characters from the book into categories. This image shows students sorting characters into dynamic characters (those that change over the course of the story) and static characters (those that stay the same). In small group discussions, students then had to choose the MOST dynamic character and give evidence to support their claim.