Reading Wordless Books

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FOR REAL: A Web Documentary about Immigrant Lives in NYC

The Ellis Island virtual tour and Bertha Devlin’s interview certainly helped us further our learning not only about the topic of immigration, but also about reading visual images.

The topic of immigration is one that we hear about a lot on the news, especially since the presidential election is less than a year away and this is one hot issue for a lot of voters.

For your homework tonight, you will be reading Section III of The Arrival. To help build more connections to help you read The Arrival with deeper understanding, we explored immigration in the present time through the eyes of 3 teenagers whose familes have made their homes in New York.

The website we explored for this class activity was FOR REAL: A Web Documentary about Immigrant Lives in NYC (accessed at http://www.tenement.org/foreal/). In pairs, we spent the class period exploring this website.

Homework:

For your homework, you will be working with the same partner you worked with today in class. Before class ended, I let you know that you would need to set a up a time this evening that you both could be online for an IM chat session.

1. Prior to this pre-scheduled time, you will read Section III of The Arrival at least one time, using your visual literacy skills, including a reflection on the connections we’ve been making regarding the topic of immigration.
2. Also, before the pre-scheduled meeting time, listen to the audioclip (look below the illustration) that I created to highlight the above illustration from Section III. (Shaun Tan has informally deemed this illustration, “The Story of the Giants.”) This will help you to make a deeper connection in your reading of the story, as well as in the IM chat session you’ll conduct next.
3. As requested in the audioclip, write 3 questions about “The Story of the Giants” you would ask Shaun Tan in an interview if you could. You can do this after your IM session if you like.
4. Using the Meebo IM account we used in our last unit of study, you and your partner will spend 10 minutes reading and discussing the illustration shown above from Section III. (Shaun Tan has informally deemed this illustration, “The Story of the Giants.”)
5. Each of you should then (a) copy and paste the text of your IM chat session into an email addressed to me and (b) include at least 2 additional sentences about something you personally found interesting either about the homework session or today’s class session.

–Silver Lisa

◊◊◊◊Note: The illustration above from The Arrival is directly linked to Shaun Tan’s website. You may access it at the following links: http://shauntan.net/books.html and http://shauntan.net/images/books/the-arrival8.jpg.◊◊◊◊