Ready-to-teach lesson
Whole-Book Plan
Ruby's Wish - Grade 3 - Short lesson
TIME
OBJECTIVE
PRODUCT
16 minutes Read the whole book and explain what Ruby wants, what is in her A chart of the wish, the obstacle way, and how she gets it. and the ending Essential question: How does a girl in this house end up at university?
- Materials
- Text to mark
- • The book
- • Passage 7 - the garden classroom, seen from above through a lattice
- • One chart each
- • Passage 11 - one lit window in a dark house
- Prepared passages: Passage 7, Passage 11, Passage 12, Passage 18
Lesson sequence
1 Before reading - 3 min
- Passage 12 - writing with a brush on a long scroll
- Passage 18 - the grandfather at his desk with the poem
- Focus:
- A poem that could get her into trouble
- Teacher direction:
- Read the poem Ruby writes and stop. Ask the class what they think will happen to a girl who hands that in, in a house where she is one of over a hundred grandchildren.
- Prepared text:
- Passage 12 2 Teacher model - 5 min
- Teacher model:
- I read the classroom page and look at how it is drawn. We are above the garden, looking down through a window lattice at the children at their desks. That is not just a nice angle - the words on that page say the grandfather's office windows opened onto the garden and that he would get up to watch. So the picture has put me where he stands, and it does that before he has done anything.
- Prepared text:
- Passage 7 3 What Ruby wants and what stands in the way - 8 min
page 1
- Focus:
- Lessons at a cost, and one plain sentence
- Teacher direction:
- Using Passages 11 and 18, write what Ruby wants and what makes it difficult.
- Expected answer:
- Ruby wants to go to university. She says so plainly when her grandfather asks - the boys will go to university and the girls will be married, and she would much rather go. What stands in the way is that girls in the house are not expected to keep studying: one by one the other girls stopped going to the classes and only Ruby carried on, catching up on her embroidery at night so that her candle was still burning long after everyone else had gone to bed. So she is doing both jobs to keep the lessons.
- Student product:
- Two boxes: what she wants, what is in the way
- Prepared text:
- Passage 11, Passage 18
Support & extension
Above: Ruby tries to give her grandfather small answers first. Explain why, and what it tells you about how she expected him to react.
Below: Fill the two boxes, then write what happens on New Year's Day.
Assessment
- Says Ruby wanted to go to university
- Says the other girls stopped going to lessons
- Says Ruby worked at night to keep up
- Says she wrote a poem about only boys being cared for
- Says her grandfather gave her a letter from a university
page 2