Salt to the Sea -- A Novel Study

Thirty-three years after the sinking of the Titanic, which claimed over 1,500 lives, came the loss of another passenger ship.  This one may have claimed over 9,000 lives.  Yet we never hear about this significant tragedy with its loss of life.

It was the Wilhelm Gustloff, which went down in the Baltic Sea on January 30, 1945.  On board were German soldiers as well as civilians who were escaping from the Soviet Army as they marched across Lithuania and East Prussia.  

Ruta Sepetys has created a novel that will bring this event out of relative obscurity.  It is called Salt to the Sea.  In this novel, there are four main characters and their stories are told together in alternating short chapters.  Joana is a Lithuanian woman who has been trained as a nurse.  She has a family connection to the characters in Sepetys other historical fiction story, which is called Between Shades of Gray.  Florian is East Prussian and has been working as a apprentice to the art conservator in Konigsberg and is carrying something in his pack that he will not let out of his sight.  Emilia is a young Polish girl with a secret of her own.  And Alfred is a German youth who has been drafted very late in the war to serve as a sailor in the Kriegsmarine. He dreams of glory that is unlikely to come his way.  

This is such an important and interesting book and it deserves to be studied and enjoyed.  So I've created a novel study that might help teachers and homeschoolers to work with this book.  

Salt to the Sea - A novel study has a lot of content, including: 

-- A character tracker that invites students to reflect upon the three different types of literary conflict and potentially write an essay sharing their findings, 

-- An information skills lesson that helps students to identify an author's purpose in publishing Web information, 

-- Discussion or essay questions

-- And a comprehension quiz,

It also has a Google Earth Tour Builder lesson that brings to life the journey of these four characters.  You can access this Tour Builder for free. 

And because it is so much easier to teach something when students have a something to help them orient their learning, I have created a FREE Google Doc lesson with a location chart as well as an answer key. Feel free to view, make a copy, and use. 

#DigiFoot12 -- Savvy Searching

I spend most of my time trying to convince students of the need to search smartly and evaluate, evaluate, evaluate ALL the time.  Despite the fact that I front load my student's school year with activities that use their evaluation skills to identify the "joke" Web site, I have to continually remind them as they are searching throughout the year.

I'll be honest, I'm not so sure how much using fake Web sites helps in the end but I also have my favorites that I like to share with kids for a fun activity for a 5th grade library bootcamp, if nothing else.

My absolute favorite is the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.  Google It if you haven't about this amazing cephalopod!!!  It is highly endangered because of habitat loss around the Pacific Northwest.  Since my students live in the Pacific Northwest, we always have at least one kid who admits to seeing one in their back yard.

Using the Tree Octopus Web site with my kids as a joke at the beginning of school gives me the opportunity to establish a code word with kids.  For the rest of their time with me, when I'm looking at a Web site with them that I don't like... I'll ask them if they think that it looks like "tree octopus" information!!!

Who writes YOUR information? Getting students to quickly reflect on sources

In my library for the past two weeks we've been focusing on the mandatory 5th grade science fair, gearing up for our annual Japanese Internment history day where we invite members of our community to share their stories of the time of internment... and raising over 1,000 chum salmon in a tank.  I really love my job.

We've also been sneaking other research projects into the schedule whenever we can and this Jamestown themed information literacy idea grew out of my HUGE FRUSTRATION over trying to get students to spend time reflecting on who wrote their information.  They can talk the talk when I make suggestions about NOT using information written by other students but they actually don't walk the walk when they are out surfing the Web.

Now I don't want to make research more onerous but I would love to see students giving more attention to identifying the author behind their sources, without having to drag out a Web site evaluation rubric (OH! How I hate those!)

So here's my new thought.  It's an incentive chart.

I created a chart with markers that were themed for their Jamestown research project.  Before starting their research we quickly discussed the positives and drawbacks to certain types of information.  Students were then divided into teams.  Each team wrote their team's name next to one of the marker colors on the right.  As they researched their topics independently they identified the type of resource they used and dragged a marker over into the graph. 

At the end of the research session, we talked about which resources received the most users.
You can download my FREE SmartBoard Notebook slide that I used for Jamestown from my Teachers Pay Teachers store but I'm really trying to throw out the idea that we need to find quick and creative ways of giving students more of an incentive to reflect on who writes the information that they choose to use for a project.

Since I was uploading this Jamestown activity, I also uploaded the mini-novel study that I created a few years ago to help my teachers use three different Jamestown novels in their classroom. It focuses on the real historic character, Samuel Collier.  TWO authors used him as the basis for their historical fiction novels and their takes on his personality were very different.  This novel study is linked up at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.