This workshop deals with important, though controversial, issues to consider in developing multicultural literature lessons for the classroom. Participants will take part in hands-on activities to evaluate their current and future multicultural literature lessons. They will walk away with concepts necessary for multicultural literature instruction, as well as resources for finding multicultural literature for specific age groups and strategies for developing effective lesson plans which incorporate multicultural literature.
Students read, analyze, and respond to literature as a record of life experiences.
Using the study of a patchwork quilt, participants of this workshop will discover the rich diversity of nationalities, customs, and ethnic groups within the cultures of our students. The ideas generated from this study will serve as topics for descriptive writing. The strategies of this workshop will center around biographical and autobiographical methods. Also, The Keeping Quilt and The Bedspread will be read as a resource for writing ideas. Participants will create an individual quilt pattern reflecting the culture, traditions, and history of their family, will draft a description of the original quilt square, modeling descriptive writing techniques, will publish their descriptive paragraphs by reading them aloud to the class as they display individually their original quilt squares, and will then weave their individual quilt squares into a class quilt.