Teacher’s Guide to the Weedflower Project Portfolio

 

The Weedflower Project Portfolio was designed with four objectives in mind:

 

  1. To support Arizona state standards in reading, language arts, and social studies in grades 4 through 8.
  2. To provide teachers and students with a variety of activities that help with understanding the characters, settings, and plot of Weedflower.
  3. To allow teachers the ability to use the Portfolio in either a paper format or electronic format, depending on the availability of technology resources at their individual schools or in their classrooms.
  4. To allow for flexible use of the ideas and concepts in the Portfolio.

 

Arizona State Standards:

 

A chart aligning Portfolio activities to State Standards is contained in Appendix 1 to this document.

 

Activities:

 

The activities are designed to help students reflect on and articulate their understand of changes that occur throughout Weedflower.  These include:  Circle of Friends, timelines, maps, Venn diagrams, reflection pages, essays, and research activities.  Many of these activities are repeated as students progress through the novel so that there is an opportunity to track developments in characters, conditions, and events.  Additionally, students are encouraged from time to time to place themselves in the main character’s (Sumiko’s) situation and postulate what their own responses may be to traumatic events.

 

Formats

 

The Portfolio can be printed and used as a workbook, or students can directly input their work into the Porfolio using MS Power Point.  In either case, the Portfolio is deliberately simple in design so that students and teachers can add color and images, change fonts, etc.  as they wish. 

 

Flexibility:

 

Here is a list of ways teachers may use the Portfolio:

 

  1. As a guide through the novel.
  2. As a “whole class” examination, making transparencies of selected pages and having the whole class participate in the activities.  Teachers may use the entire portfolio, or select specific activities as they see fit.
  3. Have students work in groups on the Portfolio.  Again, teachers may elect to use all of the Portfolio or parts of the Portfolio.
    1. Teachers can assign groups to classes of Portfolio activities, such as a Circle of Friends group, a timeline group, a map group, etc.  Groups can transfer their activity to butcher paper and present their final products to the class.
    2. Teachers can assign groups to chapter blocks as defined in the portfolio.
    3. Teachers can assign groups to the entire portfolio.
  4. Assemble a custom Portfolio of selected activities, print it and distribute it to each student to accomplish as an individual project.
  5. Assemble a custom Portfolio for some tasks, but assign other tasks to groups.
  6. If teachers collaborate across curricular lines, some Portfolio tasks can be distributed:  some for  Language Arts, some for Reading, and some for Social Studies. 

 

Additional Ideas

 

  1. Have students select three or four events and see if they can use the Internet or other resources to corroborate those parts of Sumiko’s story.
  2. Put together a “text set” of books about Japanese American Internment.  Books in your text set could include:
    1. Baseball Saved Us, by Ken Mochizuki
    2. The Bracelet by Yochiko Uchida
    3. Journey to Topaz by Yochiko Uchida
    4. Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
    5. Remember Pearl Harbor:  American and Japanese Survivors Tell Their Story by Thomas Allen (Dewey 940.54)
    6. Behind Barbed Wire:  The Story of Japanese American Internment During World War II by Lila Pearl
    7. The Children of Topaz:  The Story of a Japanese American Internment Camp:  base on a classroom diary by Michael Tunnell
    8. When Justice Failed:  The Ken Korematsu Story by Steven Chin

 

There are many more books out there, and these are just a few. See the Thematic Text Set page for more ideas.

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