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Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday's 
Monday Motivators

This blog page hosts posts some Mondays. The intent and purpose of a Monday Motivator is to provide teachers or readers with an idea they can share or an activity they can conduct right away.

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Poetry and Posters with When Stars are Scattered by Dr. Emily Pendergrass

12/19/2022

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The wonderfully written middle grades graphic novel When Stars are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed is Omar’s recount of his life in a Kenyan refugee camp. Life is challenging in the camp: food is hard to find, school is limited, medical care is almost non-existent. And Omar has to take care of his brother who has special needs. This is a powerful story that can be used from 5th grade through high school. One of the strengths of this graphic novel beyond the powerful story is the richness of the visual imagery embedded within the text.  

There are many, many things teachers can do with this novel. Students can read about the different Kenyan refugee camps or watch this Politics and Prose video where the authors of the novel share their stories. 

With my students, we did a number of things. There are two in particular that I will share today. 
  1. Collaborative found poetry to uncover themes.
  2. Characterization Posters

Collaborative Found Poetry
Found poems take existing words, phrases, lines from a text and are reordered into a poem. A literary collage of a text. In this instance, each student in their groups of 4-5, found 2 significant lines. Lines that stood out to them personally. Lines that were powerful. Each student wrote their lines down and shared them with their small group. Students then worked to write 1 poem using the lines from the text (see image 1). Students shared the poems with the whole class, and we discussed themes that arose out of reading the poetry.
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Image 1: Example of Collaborative Found Poetry.
Characterization Posters
In my experience, characterization can sometimes be tricky for students as they tend to stick to what the character looks like. We expanded this to include not only the physical description, but also each character’s personality, thoughts, and actions, and how other characters think/act around the focal character. 
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Each group chose their favorite character and were given the following assignment sheet.
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Image 2: Assignment Sheet
The items in the list are adapted from an assignment by Melanie Hundley and are concepts that we have been working on in class. These criteria (i.e. adjectives, similes) are skills that we had been practicing and when mashed together in this assignment make a nice way to discuss characterization and see what all students have learned. You can change the criteria to skills that you’ve been working on in your class. You can ask students to complete the assignment alone or in small groups. There is lots of room to play with this assignment. See image 3 for example posters of the character Fatuma from the novel When Stars are Scattered.
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    Curators

    Melanie Hundley
    ​Melanie is a voracious reader and loves working with students, teachers, and authors.  As a former middle and high school teacher, she knows the value of getting good young adult books in kids' hands. She teaches young adult literature and writing methods classes.  She hopes that the Monday Motivator page will introduce teachers to great books and to possible ways to use those books in classrooms.
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    Emily Pendergrass
    Emily loves reading, students, and teachers! And her favorite thing is connecting texts with students and teachers. She hopes that this Monday Motivation page is helpful to teachers interested in building lifelong readers and writers! 
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    Jason DeHart
    In all of his work, Jason hopes to point teachers to quality resources and books that they can use. He strives to empower others and not make his work only about him or his interests. He is a also an advocate of using comics/graphic novels and media in classrooms, as well as curating a wide range of authors.
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    Abbey Bachman
    Abbey hopes to share her knowledge as well as learn more resources for teaching YA lit and reading new and relevant YA picks. She was a secondary English teacher for 11 years before earning my PhD in Curriculum & Instruction. Her research centers around student choice in texts and the classroom, so staying relevant on new YA books is a passion that she shares with others.
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