Ready-to-teach lesson
Determine Theme
Just like Josh Gibson - Grade 3 - Short lesson
TIME
OBJECTIVE
PRODUCT
18 minutes Find the ways this book shows what Grandmama was kept out of, Three findings with evidence, and what she carried with her anyway. and what she remembers Essential question:
Everybody says she is good. What is stopping her?
- Materials
- Text to mark
- • The book
- • Passage 2 - a bat propped beside a newborn
- One finding sheet each
- Prepared passages: Passage 2, Passage 3, Passage 4
Lesson sequence
1 Launch - 3 min
- Passage 3 - a fence, with a girl on one side and two players on the other
- Passage 4 - a girl in a catcher's chest protector, family watching from benches
- Focus:
- A fence, doing the explaining
- Teacher direction:
- Show the fence picture without the words and ask what is happening. Then read the page. The picture has already said it.
- Prepared text:
- Passage 3 2 Teacher model - 5 min
- Teacher model:
- I read the praise and the sentence that follows it. Everybody agreed she could do the lot: hitting, throwing, running the bases - and then, too bad she's a girl. The compliment and the refusal arrive in the same breath from the same people. Nobody in the book is being cruel. That is what makes it worth stopping on.
- Prepared text:
- Passage 4 3 How the book shows the barrier - 10 min
page 1
- Focus:
- A fence, a rule, and a compliment
- Teacher direction:
- Using Passages 2, 3 and 4, write down the ways this book shows what Grandmama was kept out of.
- Expected answer:
- It shows it three ways rather than explaining it once. There is the flat rule - girls in the forties didn't play baseball, and were not supposed to take the field or even have batting dreams. There is the fence she stands outside, which the picture puts right between her and the boys in uniform. And there is the praise that ends in too bad she's a girl, from the same people who have just said she could do it all. Against those is what she was given at the start: a papa who turned up on the day she was born with a bat and said his baby would make baseballs fly.
- Student product:
- Three findings, with the evidence for each
- Prepared text:
- Passage 2, Passage 3, Passage 4
Support & extension
Above: Nobody in this book is unkind to Grandmama and she still cannot play. Explain how both of those can be true.
Below: Fill the three boxes, then write what she remembers at the plate.
Assessment
- Says girls were not supposed to play
- Uses the fence as evidence
- Says people praised her and then said too bad she's a girl
- Says her papa gave her a bat when she was born
- Says she remembered the fence as well as the good things
page 2