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 Clos