Re-purposing a Shared Knowledge link
One of my responsibilities in my new job is to help students identify and adjust to American culture. Our director identified independence, self-sufficiency, the American Dream, and equality/diversity as the key values we need to introduce first...via a mass-market movie. We have been going back and forth about what to show: something Disney like High School Musical or Lemonade Mouth, something more like The Duff or Mean Girls or Edge of Seventeen (all nixed for various reasons you might imagine when thinking about parents!). I think we've settled on Spiderman: Homecoming.
That said, I had to get moving on the values lesson and also on the two summer reading books each grade level had been assigned but no one has read. I needed a compelling video to illustrate these values and link them first to teenagers, so I re-purposed classmate Tyrone Sandaal's link to a New York Times video of NYC kids, which he used for his shared knowledge project on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This video shows kids who look like the kids in our program and who illustrate every one of those values in one way or another. My students were totally engaged in the 10-minute video...even the too-cool kids quickly and noticeably dropped their efforts to look uninterested. They heard American peers speaking like teens do, they saw kids like themselves (Asian kids, Latino kids, kids of African origin, etc.), and they were easily able to pick out examples of the values and then do the same with the summaries on the backs of the reading books we are going to start first...Hatchet, Lord of the Flies, and Into the Wild. So, thank you, @tsandaal , for sharing such a great resource that can be used in many different ways!
That said, I had to get moving on the values lesson and also on the two summer reading books each grade level had been assigned but no one has read. I needed a compelling video to illustrate these values and link them first to teenagers, so I re-purposed classmate Tyrone Sandaal's link to a New York Times video of NYC kids, which he used for his shared knowledge project on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This video shows kids who look like the kids in our program and who illustrate every one of those values in one way or another. My students were totally engaged in the 10-minute video...even the too-cool kids quickly and noticeably dropped their efforts to look uninterested. They heard American peers speaking like teens do, they saw kids like themselves (Asian kids, Latino kids, kids of African origin, etc.), and they were easily able to pick out examples of the values and then do the same with the summaries on the backs of the reading books we are going to start first...Hatchet, Lord of the Flies, and Into the Wild. So, thank you, @tsandaal , for sharing such a great resource that can be used in many different ways!
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