After finishing the novel, Peak, by Roland Smith, my sixth graders had gathered a lot of evidence in relation to how the main character, Peak, went through significant changes. Armed with this evidence, students were able to think deeply about the significance of his transformation and how it contributed to the overall theme of the book. Now they needed to write about their thinking. Here's how I tricked them into crafting multiple, meaty, evidence-based paragraphs through the use of innovative technology...
Climbing the Mountain
With an engaging plot set on the intriguing Mt. Everest, and a host of complex characters, Peak is a great book for teaching characterization, including character change. After giving a short lesson on characterization-- how to learn about a character through his or her thoughts, feelings, speech, etc., I broke the book into reading chunks and had my sixth graders track what they were learning about the main character, Peak, by using a simple three-column graphic organizer that includes evidence, trait, and student thinking. Students used these organizers during biweekly book club meetings to discuss their thinking about the character and story events. Also during these meetings, group members hashed out any confusions and used Costa's Levels of Questioning to guide and deepen discussion.
At home, students responded to blog posts relating to how they would have handled certain situations that characters had to go through. To get them thinking about different points of view, I asked them to respond to certain events from the book through the eyes of one of the secondary characters. This was a fun step for the students who produced more writing than I expected for the assignment.
After the Summit
After several book club meetings, we held a class Socratic Seminar to orally exchange and evaluate our ideas about the characters and the book from start to finish. This step helped many students (as they themselves reflected) clarify their thinking about different aspects of the characters and plot. Now it was time to write. Voki.com is a website that allows users to choose from a variety of physical features, backgrounds, and voices to easily create speaking avatars, or characters. (I ended up creating and paying about 30 dollars for a one-year Voki Classroom account in order to make student log-in easy, but there are ways to use the site for free.) First, I previewed Voki for my students by creating an avatar of myself giving them instructions, which were to create a character from Peak to be interviewed as part of a news story about the changes they witnessed in the main character. Seeing my Voki energized students to get started on their own. Instructing them to use their graphic organizers and book club notes, I had partners begin working together to add character transformation ideas to a class wall at Padlet.com, which is a great site for group brainstorming. From these ideas, pairs chose a character through which to speak, and started settling on traits to analyze in their script for their Voki avatar.
Positive Effects of the Exercise
Students were excited to write because the end product would be more than just paragraphs. They wanted these characters to have substance, so they worked hard to choose (with my guidance) relevant evidence and clearly explain its significance. An added bonus to using this site as part of the writing process arrived unexpectedly as students started copying parts of their scripts into the text box to experiment with voice options. The computerized voice would would read back exactly what was written, only pausing if properly placed punctuation had been inserted, and only pronouncing correctly those words that had been spelled right. All of the sudden, even my hastiest little editors were poring over their scripts, making tweaks to their writing, tweaks that I'm not sure I alone could have motivated them to tend to. In the end, we ended up with a beautiful collection of articulate characters speaking thoughtfully about their observations...
Stumbles
That is not to say there were no technological hiccups along the way. Voki limits speak time to about 90 seconds, so some scripts had to be split up over two different student accounts. Also, I'm still working on how best to sew all of the interviews together to tell a cohesive story, other than just filming the computer screen as each interview runs. If you have ideas or feedback, let me know!
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