Making Connections

I've been reading all of Paul Parks's posts, in his blog The Sandbox, with great interest. His descriptions of life at the Kandahar Air Field are very compelling. I decided to share one with my Reading Comprehension group, which is made up of a dozen grade 3 and 4 students. I chose the post School Burning that describes the attack on the education system in Afghanistan and asks the reader to question how they would feel if someone burnt their school down or tried to prevent them from getting an education. It was a pretty serious topic for my students but we spent two lessons working through the article and discussing it.

We are currently reading to make connections to our world and so as a continuation I decided to tie in a real world site. On April 10th we went on a field trip to our local Memorial Park, which contains a monument to those soldiers who fell in the First and Second World Wars. It was a beautiful sunny day and the students enjoyed the walk over. Once at the park they listened as I read aloud the picture book The Wall by Eve Bunting. This book describes a father and son's trip to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. to find the grandfather's name on the Wall. When they find the name the grandson leaves a picture of himself, weighted down with stones, below the name. After we read the book the students and I made connections between our monument and the one in Washington. We also discussed the soldiers serving in Afghanistan who have died. Before we left the students all placed a picture of one of the Canadian soldiers who was killed recently and weighted them down with stones. I think it was a good lesson and hopefully the students made some important connections in both reading and life.