#SOL19 Day 16 – Sarah and How She Got Her Name

Throughout my years as a high school English teacher, there have been certain teaching techniques I’ve used that have raised a few eyebrows. Anything that didn’t appear “rigorous enough” was discouraged, no matter what skills were being taught.

Independent reading didn’t include direct instruction. The kids weren’t doing enough during that time. (Doesn’t reading itself count!?) Never mind the one-on-one conferences that took place, where I was doing short mini-lessons to help students improve their collection of reading strategies.

Book clubs weren’t “rigorous enough” because they weren’t whole-class novels. How could you possibly teach 4-5 books at once?! Never mind that more students were willing to read and analyze these books because they had the freedom to choose a title that interested them.

Using picture books in my classroom were not even close to “rigorous enough.” How could a high school English teacher possibly challenge our students with a picture book? Never mind that writing techniques in picture books are incorporated in YA and adult novels too. Just take a peak inside my classroom and see how:

Alma and How She Got Her Name by Juana Martinez-Neal is one of my current favorites. I’ve used it for quickwrites, as well as imitating style. If you don’t know the book, Alma is a young girl who finds her long name, Alma Sofia Esperanza José Pura Candela, to be way too long. She tells this to her father, only to learn why she got that name in response.

My picture book inspiration.

For a quickwrite, my students shared the history of their name. They described all they knew about it with as much detail as they could. If they didn’t know a lot about their name, they were encouraged to ask that night. The following day, I read them Alma and How She Got Her Name, and then started writing my own draft called Sarah and How She Got Her Name using my name, Sarah Helene. Here is the draft I wrote right in front of my students:

Sarah was my great-grandmother on my mother’s side. In the Jewish religion, names are given based on someone who passed away. Sarah also fit because my mother, an elementary school teacher, had a student named Sarah she adored.  

Helene came from my father’s mother, Helen, who passed away when he was 13. My parents didn’t like the name Helen for me, so they added the “e” to the end.

What followed was a mini-lesson on style. I put the book under the document camera, and student shared what they noticed about the way it was written. An anchor chart was created, and students used it to create their own piece.

Their final drafts were gorgeous. Elements of style–purposeful repetition, dialogue, formatting, and sentence structure–were modeled and learned through this picture book. Just because picture books often have young characters and images doesn’t mean they can’t be models for high schoolers; they are models of great writing for any age.