What?
Estimated time
Why?
How?
Get Ready
- Brainstorm a list of diverse community members who engage in positive work and make important contributions. Consider approaching:
- Family members and friends
- School community members
- Other community members
- Arrange for community members to visit, call or Skype the classroom so students can conduct interviews about their social justice work during school time.
- Adapt the sample rubric into a visual checklist. Refer to the rubric to define expectations and components of community spotlight trading cards before students begin working.
Get Set
- Verbally introduce students to the preparatory steps included in the Do Something Planning Guide. Instruct them in the process of mapping the steps necessary to prepare for their trading cards.
- Explore examples of positive community contributions with students.
- Coach students on how to ask questions so interviewees are prompted to share relevant facts or “statistics” and pertinent information. For very young children, facilitate the interviews with a group of children. Facts should include:
- What they do
- Who they work with
- The purpose of their work
- Give students time to plan their cards. Prompt them to draw portraits of their community members and record statistics about them on the card.
Go!
- Have students share their “trading cards” with the whole class. Student can switch cards with a classmate, read it, then “trade” it to a different person.
Reflection
- Reflect further on how the contributions of community members connect to central text themes;
- Share why different community leaders’ positive contributions are important;
- Connect work of community leaders to important issues that impact community.
English language learners
This task offers an assessment option that balances art and writing in a way that is both creative and visually appealing. Graphic organizers, planning sheets and sentence starters can assist with the linguistic component of the task. The task focuses on spatial/artistic, linguistic and interpersonal learning modalities.
Connection to anti-bias education
Identifying community members engaged in social justice work allows students to forge strong connections between their learning and positive social action, in and out of the classroom.