From Orchard Valley Class 4/5 Teacher Claudia Reinhardt: The fourth and fifth graders are reading the book One Crazy Summer as their first class reader for this school year. Not only is the book a great read written by award-winning author Rita Williams-Garcia, but it also features non-white main characters, which allows students of color to experience a reader as a mirror in a society that rarely provides one, while white students get to read a book that serves as a window into the experience of others.
Eleven-year old Delphine and her two younger sisters travel to Oakland, California to spend the summer with a mother they barely know. Their mother, a poet and printer, gives them a cold welcome and wants them to attend a nearby Black Panther summer camp. The book explores some great themes, such as race, prejudice, friendship, abandonment, identity, and art and culture. It requires one to check one’s assumptions continuously along the way.
Our language arts periods have been dedicated to discussing the book, learning vocabulary (from civilized to wino), and working on reading fluency. The book has brought up a lot of great questions by the students. Fortunately, some of these questions can be answered by people who lived during these times including their grandparents.
The fourth and fifth graders have thus written letters to grandparents, as well as colleagues and friends of their teacher. They are eagerly awaiting responses via snail mail to hear firsthand accounts of how it was to live during the tumultuous 1960s.
We'll post some of what they learn in another blog post soon.
