The West Side

If you are in the field of education you know what Open Court is and what kind of reputation it has. However, this morning I was able to take a very dull story out of Open Court and make it something the students were able to delve into. The lesson was on the story The West Side, where a young Puerto Rican boy moves to New York to get a better education and it addresses the challenges he faces like culture shock, language barriers, and relationship issues. The story itself created the path for my lesson where I focused on heritage, culture, and feelings. We began the lesson with a visualization strategy where the students close their eyes and imagine leaving Long Beach and being placed somewhere completely unfamiliar. (Learned about this strategy in my reading methods course) We then made a circle map(I had a training on thinking maps last fall) of how we would feel if we were in the character's position. This anticipatory set got the students interested in the story and gave them a personal connection to the main character, Juan. During the audio play of the story, I paused the story and gave the students one minute to reflect/ explore what was occurring in the story(a reading strategy that I learned in adolescent literature at Cal Poly). Some of the responses my students gave to this activity were amazingly deep and truly showed higher order thinking and deeper meaning. All together I felt as though this lesson was one of the best I have ever taught because the students actually wanted to participate in it which isn't a habit with Open Court.