segregation | Expect the Miraculous

Thanks to Scholastic Book Fairs our fourth and fifth graders were introduced to debut author India Hill Brown. Her new book The Forgotten Girl releases in November, but it is a featured book on Scholastic’s fall book fair allowing readers to enjoy it well in advance of release day.

The Forgotten Girl is about 2 friends, Iris and Daniel, who leave their home one night to play in the first snowfall of the year. They sneak away into the woods to get to some fresh snow and to be out of sight. Iris decides to make a snow angel, and when she gets up, she realizes she has just made a snow angel on top of a forgotten grave. This action awakens a ghost named Avery, who needs help being remembered. Iris and Daniel launch into a research project to remember the deceased members of the segregated African American cemetery and to have the area cleaned up. However, Iris is put in some dangerous situations due to her new ghostly friend.

Our local Athens history has some interesting connections with this book. We invited local expert, Fred Smith Sr, to speak to students ahead of our visit with India. He shared the history of segregated cemeteries in Athens, including the slave burial grounds at the University of Georgia. He also shared how UGA moved some of the remains as well as built on top of the burial sites. Fred Smith Sr has been active in the process of acknowledging and honoring the forgotten graves.

He then shared about our 2 black cemeteries in Athens that were created after slavery ended. The Gospel Pilgrim Cemetery is where Harriet Powers is buried. She is well known for her Bible story quilts which now hang in the Smithsonian and the Boston Museum of Art. I brought in my replica of her quilt for students to see.

Scholastic sent books for pre-ordering ahead of the event, so we were also able to read the first chapter before the visit.

Our library windows transformed into the cover of the book with a the title sign, trees, and tombstones representing some of our Athens graveyard residents.

India Hill Brown spoke for about 30 minutes to our 4th and 5th graders. She shared some of her favorite books as a child as well as her love of writing from an early age. She also surprised us by sharing that she really doesn’t like scary stories. However, she said one way to get over your fear of something is by doing it or by turning it into art.

India showed us pictures of the cemetery in her own community that inspired her to write the book. She wanted to weave in the history of forgotten cemeteries with a ghost story. We always love it when authors share the creative process of a story, and India showed us how the story went through multiple revisions and edits to reach the final version. I loved how she explained the different kinds of changes she made from the content of the story to spelling mistakes. Students are always surprised how long the entire process takes. Even though the first draft was done in about a month, the entire process of creating the finished book took over a year.

Students had a chance to ask India lots of questions about writing and her favorite things in life. I even got to ask a questions about any ghostly happenings she has encountered in her own life. After her talk, India took time to greet students as they exited. I loved seeing students making connections with her and even doing chants and hand clapping games with her.

Many times when we host and author, they are in a hurry to get to their next event. We usually do signing without students and then deliver books. India wanted to greet her readers, so we had students wait in the library and get in line for greeting and signing. I loved watching students glow as they met her and shared their excitement about her book.

Now that the visit is over, we have 5 copies of the book in the library and all 5 have already been checked out. Every classroom also has a copy in the classroom thanks to our PTA. I have a feeling many students who missed out on pre-orders will want to purchase the book at our fall book fair.

Thank you Scholastic Book Fairs for bringing India to our school. Thank you India Hill Brown for sharing your historically important story with our readers. I can’t wait to hear the conversations that take place as students read this book.

5^th grade has a massive social studies curriculum. It spans from the civil war all the way up to the present. One of the things that they have been doing for the past 2 years that I love is using Christopher Paul Curtis’s books to tie in to the curriculum. They start with Elijah of Buxton, move to Bud Not Buddy, and finish with the Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963.

The civil rights movement is where they have been spending a lot of time recently, so the teacher emailed me to see what we might do in the library to focus on this time period in her language arts class. The standards they are working on are:

SS5H8 The student will describe the importance of key people, events, and developments between 1950-1975.

b. Explain the key events and people of the Civil Rights movement; include Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and civil rights activities of Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Since it’s poetry month, I wanted to pull poetry into our time together, and I knew that 5^th graders would be able to handle some complex text and concepts.

Just like with 3^rd grade, we read Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles, but their background information was much deeper than what 3^rd graders knew. They had connections and stories to share about the riots and peaceful marches that took place during the civil rights movement. It was the perfect opportunity for me to also pull in Revolution by Deborah Wiles. This book doesn’t publish until May 27^th, but I have an advance reader’s copy from the Texas Library Association Conference. I was able to show them some of the speeches, music, advertisements, etc from the time period to accompany the picture book, Freedom Summer.

For poetry, the 5^th graders created 2 kinds of found poetry. They used the Word Mover app on the iPad to create magnetic poetry. The app has a word bank that is words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. They also used pages from Freedom Summer and a couple of pages from Revolution to create blackout poetry.

This time for blackout poetry, we used the New York Times interactive site to create blackout poetry together. The site makes it very easy to select & deselect words from articles to create 15-word blackout poems. We did an example together on the board. The teacher also helped demonstrate how to mark words on their own paper by putting boxes around words in the NY Times article on the board.

We found that a good first step for students in making blackout poetry is to read or skim the page and then put boxes around words or phrases that stand out. Once you are sure of the words you want in your poem, then you blackout the rest of the page. Modeling this on the board was important today. We had very few students in 3 classes who needed to start over.

I randomly gave students pages from the books and they started the process. For the most part, it was a very quiet process. Students methodically chose their words and then quietly shared their work at their tables. A few students paired up to help each other decide on words and phrases.

As students finished their blackout poems, they grabbed an iPad and created their Word Mover poems. Just like with 2^nd grade, most students arranged their words into solid sentences rather than shaping them up like a poem. If time allowed, I conference with students and they went back into their poem to shape it into line breaks.

Almost every poem was a reflective synthesis of student understanding about events of the civil rights movement and freedom summer. Some students had some humorous twists to their poems, but most were solemn, serious, and reflective.

Take a look at their gallery. Just like Revolution immerses us in the time period through story, music, advertisements, speeches, and other documentary pieces, the student poetry immersed us in the positive and negative feelings of the civil rights movement and freedom summer through multiple perspectives.