Emily Sniegowski CI 402 E2 Conceptual Literature Unit Participation Culture and Identity Formation: Novels for the Middle

School Classroom My contributions to our project began with suggesting we use Alexies The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, because we all read the book for our annotations. I then began to research other texts that would pair well with True Diary and came across Whole Story of Half a Girl which depicts a female protagonist struggling between being half Indian and half Jewish. I thought this would pair perfectly because it would give us a wide range of cultures to explore and be a good comparison text for Alexies male Native American protagonist. I suggested this to the group, and our main texts were decided. As a group, we decided to structure a 4-week plan, with 2 weeks per text. We wrote the matrix for week 2 together, because it was easier to work together with the text we were most unfamiliar with. Then we each made the remaining 3 matrices on our own. I created the week 3 matrix, which focuses on the first half of Alexies book. Week 3 also includes a lesson plan I created for Comic Day, which gives students exposure to multiple forms of illustrated narrative in multi-media formats. I also created a second lesson plan for week 2, which covers the issue of bullying in Whole Story of Half a Girl. As far as the major assignments, I had two ideas which we ended up incorporating into the final project. I suggested we use pie charts to have the students graph their own identities based on culture, interests, personality traits, or whatever they think makes them them. I also suggested we use the cartooning aspect of Alexies book to create self-portraits to go along with their pie charts. As a group, we took these ideas and structured them into the unit and the final written narrative assignment.