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ESL 222A
Intermediate Reading/Writing Cook & Tiemroth-‐Zavala Reading & Writing Packet # Chapters 5 7 of Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech Reminder : Use 8 1/2 x 11 college ruled paper and the following format for all of your assignments for this class: Full Name Professor’s Name Intermediate Reading & Writing Date Title Get Ready to Read Activity 1 Group Work: In your group, make a list of things you don’t know but hope to find out as we continue reading:
Part 1: Active Reading
Annotation
Active reading means reading with awareness and purpose. Annotation is when you mark up the text with notes to track your thinking. In this class, you will use your pen, highlighters and sticky notes to annotate. Your teacher will show you how to do this. Every time we read, we will practice using annotation. Activity 1: Continue Highlighting: As you read Chapters 5 7 , continue to mark the information given about the characters with a yellow highlighter. Continue to highlight the information about places in pink. Continue to highlight figurative language (similes) in blue. Begin to highlight the colorful adjectives Creech uses to describe things in green.
Activity 2: Continue with Annotation in Chapters 5 7 as follows:
Left Margin
Write down what you understand about what you are reading. Make notes about the characters, setting, and story.
Text
This is what you read in your book.
Right Margin
Write down what you think and feel as you read. Include: connections to your own life, questions you have about the reading, predictions about what you think might happen in the story, and your opinions about what you read. Activity 3: Character Chart: Character’s Important Actions and What they Tell us about them In chapters 5-‐7, we get to know more about the characters in the novel. Let’s focus on trying to understand more about Gram, Gramps, Phoebe and Sal’s mother. For each character, write three important things they do or say and then what each action tells us about the kind of person they are. On a separate piece of paper, draw a chart like the one below for Gramps, Gram, Phoebe and Sal’s mother and complete it. What Gramps does What it tells me about him
Activity 4 Work with Words Vocabulary Difficult Words in Chapter 5-‐ 7 *Homework: As you read chapters 5 -‐ 7 , write down 5-‐ 10 words you don’t know. You should choose words that make it hard for you to understand a sentence, paragraph or story.
3
Class Work: In class, we will continue to choose interesting and useful words to add to our class vocabulary list. Words from chapters 1-‐4: ornery, tottery, lunatic, singlehandedly, walloping, to bury, to investigate, astounding, purely, awful
Part 2: Get the Grammar (handout on sentence types) Part 3: Building Understanding Figure it out Group work (3 people): Building Understanding As we read, we sometimes get stuck. Each person in your group will choose a part of the text where he/she got stuck to discuss with the group. Share what you know and try to help each other understand. Ask your teacher and/or look up words on the computer as needed. Find Out about it In order to understand the story better, you might need to know more about some of the people, places, and things in it. Group Work: In your group, make a list of three passages from chapters 5-‐7 that you want to understand better. You will share this list with your class and teacher and we will share what we know to improve our understanding. Summarizing: Putting it all Together Read your classmate’s summaries of chapters 2, 3 and 4 and the chart below (handouts). The chart shows you what is included in a good summary.. Write the numbers from the chart in the example summaries to identify these elements. Qualities of a Good Summary Check Below
- The title, author, and chapter(s) are identified in the first sentence.
- Enough background about the author/reading is given.
- The main idea of the reading is identified.
- All important points/details are included.
- No unimportant details are included.
- The summary is written in the student’s own words, using her own sentence structure and organization.
- The concluding sentence helps unify the entire summary.
- Someone who has not read this article/story/chapter/book could understand what it’s about just from the summary. Class Work: Choose a chapter to summarize, either chapter 5, 6 or 7. In class, we will make groups and you will discuss what to include in your chapter summary.
- Homework: Write one paragraph summarizing the main events in the chapter you chose. Use your classmate’s summaries as models. Write your summary on a separate piece of paper and attach it to this packet. Begin your summary like this: In chapter_______ of Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech, ....... Part 4: Finding Out More about a Theme in the novel (Abandonment) Read an excerpt from the article: Perspective on Fear of Abandonment Causes, Effects, and Options By Peter K. Gerlach, MSW Member NSRC Experts Council The Web address of this article is http://sfhelp.org/gwc/abandon.htm Updated August 06, 2012 Perspective When you think of the words "abandon" and "abandonment" in a family context, what comes to mind? How would you define "abandonment" to an average 10-‐year-‐old? Have you ever felt abandoned? Have you abandoned someone? What would you say is the opposite of abandonment? Can you describe (a) why some people abandon others, and (b) how abandonment affects typical kids, adults, and families? This article explores these questions to build a foundation for reducing significant personal fear of abandonment. This common fear hinders wholistic health and burdens relationships and families, What is "Abandonment"? For our purposes, abandonment is a relationship dynamic that occurs when an adult or child voluntarily:
- denies or ignores key responsibilities (a role) that someone expects them to fulfill, like parental or marital obligations, and/or they...
- chooses to end an existing relationship with someone else despite their partner/s not wanting that. This is especially traumatic when the abandoned one depends on the other person for something important, like a child or disabled adult does. Abandonment can be psychological (indifference, apathy, "coldness," lack of intimacy); and/ or physical. Psychological divorce occurs when one or both cohabiting mates abandon the other and their marital vows, roles, responsibilities, and relationship primacy. Discussion of abandonment usually focuses on an adult leaving or quitting. Family members can be equally affected if a child or grandchild "runs away from (abandons) home."
- a parent chooses a job that requires her or him to be away from home for weeks or months at a time, like foreign military service. Impacts on the Family System To fully appreciate the causes and multi-‐level impacts of adult or child abandonment, view the affected multi-‐generational ("extended") family as a dynamic system. Psychological or physical abandonment changes a family system's roles, roles, rituals, and traditions, subsystems, and social interactions in complex ways. These concurrent changes cause temporary or long-‐term anxieties until family members adapt to them and stabilize. They may lower the family's nurturance level ("functionality"), and usually cause most or all well-‐bonded family members significant losses which need to be mourned over time. Impacts on Children The childhood and long-‐term effects of excessive parental absence can range from moderate to severe, depending on a child's age, gender, bond with the absent adult (weak > strong), and their extended family's nurturance level (low > high). Common experience suggests that when young children are physically abandoned by a parent or caregiver -‐ or if a primary caregiver is "emotionally unavailable" (can't bond) -‐ the kids are "badly hurt." Their hurt is a mix of... shock, if the abandonment was unexpected and/or explosive; and... confusion -‐ many mental questions and uncertainties about the abandonment and what it means; and... shame ("low self esteem") -‐ feeling unlovable and unworthy, even if other adults are genuinely nurturing and attentive; and perhaps their hurt includes... guilts -‐ feeling (irrationally) that they did something bad or wrong that caused the abandonment; and/or... fears of (a) bonding with some or all adults / men / women; and that (b) their other caregivers may also abandon them, and they will die ; and healthy kids feel ... grief over (a) involuntarily broken bonds, and later, (b) over lost hopes and fantasies of reunion. If a child is raised in an ''anti-‐grief'' family, s/he can unconsciously carry unfinished mourning into adulthood as periodic or chronic "depression. If these hurts are intense enough, an abandoned child can develop emotional numbness and/or selective "amnesia" (repression) to protect themselves from recalling and re-‐ experiencing their abandonment trauma and losses. One or more of their personality subselves may be living in the past, and still fear the searing pain of re-‐abandonment.
These effects are often magnified because parental and spousal abandonment usually signals (a) a low-‐nurturance ("dysfunctional") home and childhood, and (b) significantly-‐wounded and unaware caregivers and ancestors. Minor kids can be also be stressed by other family members' reactions to the abandonment. If some family members scorn and vilify the adult or child who left, kids are forced to choose between loyalty to their absent parent or sibling, and other relatives. Older, less-‐wounded kids may be able to detach and not align with either side without excessive guilt or anxiety. Part 5: Sharing thoughts and opinions about what we read Journal : Making connections between two readings, the novel and the article Free Write. You will do this in class on a separate sheet of paper. When we “free-‐write”, we just put our thoughts on the paper without worrying about organization or correctness. We write to relax and explore our thoughts. Sometimes we will free-‐write before we read to help activate our minds and make connections with what we read; other times we will free-‐write after we read to go deeper into a reading topic. In the article above, Gerlach defines abandonment and describes its causes and the effects it has on children and adults. Free-‐write about each of the following questions for five minutes: on a separate piece of paper
**_1. Do you think Sal’s mother has abandoned her according to Gerlach’s definition? Explain your answer.
- Do any of the causes Gerlach mentions explain why Sal’s mother may have abandoned her? Which one and why?
- Gerlach lists several possible effects of abandonment on a child. Is Sal affected in any of these ways? Explain._** After you have written your journal entry, share some of your ideas with a classmate. Responding to chapters 5 7 Review of Paragraph structure: Read your teacher’s response to chapter 4 and the chart below. The chart shows you what is included in a good response. Write the numbers from the chart in the example response to identify these elements. Response to Chapter 4 By Lisa Cook In chapter 4 of Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech, the narrator, Sal, takes her friend Phoebe to meet her blind neighbor, Mrs. Partridge. Sal is astounded that Mrs. Partridge is able to guess Phoebe’s age by touching her face. Phoebe is not so amazed. She launches into a story
