Ready-to-teach lesson
Who Is Telling This
Just like Josh Gibson - Grade 3 - Short lesson
TIME
OBJECTIVE
20 minutes Work out how many people are between the reader and the events, and how the book marks each one.
Essential question: Whose story is this, and who is passing it on?
Materials
Text to mark
PRODUCT
A three-column sort, and the voice that ends the book
- • The book
- • Passage 1 - a catcher and an umpire, both looking up
- One sorting sheet each
- Prepared passages: Passage 1, Passage 4, Passage 6
Lesson sequence
1 Launch - 4 min
- Passage 4 - a girl in a catcher's chest protector, family watching from benches
- Passage 6 - carried shoulder-high by the team, holding up a ball
- Focus:
- Two people between us and the event
- Teacher direction:
- Ask the class who is telling this story. Read the first sentence twice and let them notice that somebody is telling us what somebody else says.
- Prepared text:
- Passage 1 2 Teacher model - 6 min
- Teacher model:
- I count the layers on the first page. Somebody is speaking to me - I cannot see who yet. That person is reporting what Grandmama says. And Grandmama is repeating something that the story goes, which means she did not see it either. So the tale about Josh Gibson has reached me third- hand, and the book tells me so in its first two sentences.
page 1
- Prepared text:
- Passage 1 3 Who says what - 10 min
- Focus:
- Grandmama says, and the story goes
- Teacher direction:
- Using Passages 1, 4 and 6, sort the sentences by who is telling them - the child, Grandmama, or nobody in particular.
- Expected answer:
- Two phrases do the sorting. Grandmama says marks the things she remembers herself - that her papa came with a bat, that Danny pretended to be a Dodger while she was always Josh Gibson for the Grays, , that everybody said she could do it all. The story goes marks the tallest claims, the ones nobody can vouch for: the ball that took a day to come down, and hitting the ball a mile. And a few lines belong to neither - girls in the forties didn't play baseball is stated as plain fact by the child telling us. Even the sentence too bad she's a girl appears twice, once inside quotation marks because somebody said it, and once without, as the teller repeating it.
- Student product:
- Three columns: Grandmama, the story goes, the teller
- Prepared text:
- Passage 1, Passage 4, Passage 6
Support & extension
Above: The child telling this story never describes herself and is only called me. Explain what the book gains by keeping her almost invisible.
Below: Sort the sentences into the three columns, then write whose voice ends the book.
Assessment
- Says a child is telling us the story
- Says the child is reporting what Grandmama said
- Uses the phrase Grandmama says as the evidence
- Says the story goes marks a tale nobody saw
- Says the last words are Grandmama's
page 2