Community – Community in Literature

By – Marie Allen

Community Unit Table of Contents:

• Unit Overview – What makes a good Community?
• This lesson asks What is Community?
• Here’s a lesson on Following Directions
• This worksheet goes with the Following Directions lesson
• Celebrating Diversity and Heritage are the topics of this lesson
• Here’s a section on Goal Setting
• This lesson looks at Community in Literature
• In this part students Explore the Multiple Intelligences
• Students find their most effective ways to learn in this lesson
• Teamwork is the subject of this lesson
• Here’s a collection of Community-Building Activities
• This is the first part of the Service Project
• Service Project Part 2…
• …and Service Project Part 3
• Here’s the Service Project Rubric

Community in Literature

Subject: Reading

TSW: Analyze the elements of community in literature.

Standards:
R-E1. Use structural analysis skills such as identifying root words, prefixes, suffixes, and word origins to decode words unfamiliar in print.
PO 3. Confirm meaning of words using context clues
R-E2. Use reading strategies such as making inferences and predictions, summarizing, paraphrasing, differentiating fact from opinion, drawing conclusions, and determining the author’s purpose and perspective to comprehend written selections
PO 1. Identify main ideas; critical and supporting details; and the author’s purpose, feelings, and point of view of the text
PO 3. Summarize the text in own words

Activity:
Read MacMurtrey’s Wall by Marc Sutherland. This is a tall tale about a man who has such a strong ego, he thinks he can wall up the ocean. Through his struggle, he discovers that the real strength is in community.

Before reading, pre-read the book by looking through the illustrations and predicting what might happen.

After reading, have the students pick out the twelve most important sentences and write them on sentence strips. Have the students put them in order. Identify the main problem and the solution. Discuss setting and characters.

Discuss which elements of the story showed that it was a strong community. For example, the townspeople pulled together to save the town, they all have a common goal, they work together, etc.

Students will each pick one of the important sentences to illustrate (2 per sentence). They will illustrate the sentence and write two new sentences that tell why community was important in MacMurtrey’s Wall. Create a spiral bound book with the students drawings accompanying the sentences, and their interpretations at the back.

Materials: MacMurtrey’s Wall by Marc Sutherland, bookmaking materials (spiral binder or rings), paper for book, sentence strips.

Assessment: Teacher observation of student’s ability to pick out important plot elements (12 important sentences), order sentence strips, illustrate their sentence, and reflection of how community is important.

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