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Teacher Guide for Tomás and the Library Lady
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Martha Kateri Ferede developed this guide for teachers to use Tomás and the Library Lady in their elementary school classrooms. The guide is intended to help teachers build students' literacy through school, home, and community connections, especially during the summer and particularly with Latino families. The guide consists of a lesson plan for use in the classroom and activities to promote summer learning and includes a family literacy handout, the Word Walk, in both English and Spanish.
Having immigrated to Canada from Ethiopia as a child, Martha has experienced firsthand the ways that families make sense of new educational opportunities for their children. She has taught elementary school in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Toronto and has worked with immigrant families searching for ways to support their children's classroom learning.
Resource teacher Rashmi Kumar and her team piloted this guide in their third-grade classroom, adapting it to their particular classroom community.
This guide is designed to help teachers build students' literacy through school, home and community connections and show families how cultural experiences and community resources can serve as powerful education tools. The guide will also help you to promote your students' summer learning—in particular, literacy learning—to prevent the “summer slide” in literacy that many children experience over the summer months.
This guide focuses especially on Latino families. It provides you as a teacher with ways to reach out to and engage Latino families-including activities and a handout that invite Latino families to use their language, culture, and skills to support their children's learning. At the center of the guide is a true story from the childhood of Tomás Rivera, a migrant worker who grew up to become a chancellor at the University of California. As a child, Tomás acquired his love for storytelling from his grandfather and his love of reading from a librarian. His story, as recounted in Pat Mora's Tomás and the Library Lady, is an inspirational tale for students and their families.
The lesson plan below contains discussion questions you can use before and while reading Tomás and the Library Lady in your elementary school classroom. The lesson plan also suggests several “integrated learning ideas” that you can use to build other student skills in addition to literacy. You can use this lesson plan at any time during the school year, but the additional activities at the end of this guide—including a family literacy handout in English and Spanish—will help you in particular to encourage summer learning.
Age Group: Grade 3 (Note: The Word Walk family literacy handout is also suitable for younger children)
Plot Summary: Tomás, a Mexican American child of migrant farm workers, travels seasonally between Texas and Iowa with his parents, younger brother, and grandfather. In Iowa, the grandfather, who tells Tomás stories in Spanish, encourages his grandson to visit the local library to find new stories. There, a kind librarian introduces Tomás to the joys of reading by selecting books for him and listening to him read aloud. Tomás spends many summer days reading at the library. Every evening at home, he delights his family by reading library books to them in English. Before Tomás leaves at the end of the summer, the librarian greets his grandfather in Spanish, which Tomás has taught her, and presents Tomás with a book of his own. Tomás's story was inspired by the real-life experience of education leader Tomás Rivera, a son of migrant workers who grew up to become chancellor of the University of California, Riverside.
Family Involvement Summary: This book tells the story of a migrant worker family that provides stable and loving support for their child's learning, despite mobility and frequent economic hardship. Tracing the development of Tomás as a reader, the story portrays the power of oral storytelling as a form of family literacy and celebrates the joys of intergenerational learning and bilingual literacy. The story shows the importance of the library as a community support for children's learning. The story also shows how a family can initiate and support a child's connection to sources of learning in the community, such as the library, and affirms the child's ability to connect his or her family to the community.
Lesson Plan Objectives
- Support students' continued literacy progress over the summer months
- Engage all families, but particularly Latino families, in thinking about their role in their children's academic learning during out-of-school time, especially during the summer
- Develop a notion of continued literacy among students and families
- Promote storytelling as an important form of literacy
Before Reading Tomás and the Library Lady With Your Class
You can begin by brainstorming with your students, using the following prompts:
- What are the different ideas and/or words that you associate with a library?
- From whom do you seek help in the library?
- If you have been to a library, what are your favorite parts of the library?
In your students' reading-response journals, have them write the title, Tomás and the Library Lady. Ask them to look at the cover picture and write responses to these questions:
- What do you think this story will be about?
- What do you notice about the name “Tomás?”
- Do you visit the library? When? Where? At school? Another library?
- What are your favorite types of books to read?
Integrated Learning Idea:
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Tips for Reading Tomás and the Library Lady
For discussion purposes, you can divide the storybook (in either its English or Spanish translation) into subunits of halves or thirds, depending on the amount of available time and classroom literacy level. Dividing into subunits will allow time for reflection and for revisiting ideas.
Discussion questions for the first third of the book:
- What time of the year is it? What descriptions help you figure this out?
- What is very special about Papá Grande?
- Why does Papá Grande suggest Tomás go to the library?
Integrated Learning Idea:
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Discussion questions for the second third of the book:
- In this section of the story, Tomás goes to the library for the first time, and the library is described like this: “Its tall windows were like eyes glaring at him.” What do these words tell you about how Tomás felt about going to the library?
- Who did Tomás meet at the library, and what did this person do to help Tomás? Ask the class to share any personal stories they have about different librarians they have met and how the librarians helped them.
- The book states that, when Tomás began to read, “He forgot about Iowa and Texas.” Why does it say he “forgot?” (Did he really forget?)
Discussion questions for the last third of the book:
- How did Tomás read to his grandfather? Why do you think that he read like that?
- How did Tomás and the library lady feel about Tomás leaving?
- Tomás had a very special role in his family by the end of the story. What was it, and why was it so important?
Integrated Learning Idea:
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The Importance of Summer Learning
The activities that follow can help students and their families appreciate that learning doesn't just happen while in school but can occur over the summer within families and communities. These activities help demonstrate that summer learning occurs not just in formal, organized programs, but also in informal settings-for example, during a walk around the neighborhood. Students can come to see the wide range of things that they can learn about over the summer and the many people who can be their teachers during this time. Finally, students can recognize how what they learn during the summer connects to what they learn in school.
How to Use These Activities
As the school year draws to a close, you can use the reflection activities below to help your students and their families think about the importance of summer learning. Depending on the amount of classroom time you have, you can pick and choose from this collection of activities. Or, you might move directly to sharing the family literacy activity, a tool for families to use over the summer to promote students' literacy.
Integrated Learning Idea:
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1. Reflection activities
In-class activities:
- Lead the class in a discussion about what they remember learning last summer—a new skill, some new information—that was important to them. If they are having trouble remembering, you can give some examples, such as learning to cook a special dish, play a new game, or how to swim. Ask students to also consider where and with whom they learned these things. Perhaps they learned from a relative, a neighbor, at a community center, or at a parent's workplace. Then have students draw a picture or write about themselves doing this activity, indicating whom they were with, and where it happened.
- Have students work together to list some of the new information or skills they have learned in school over the past academic year. Solicit class ideas for where students might go in their neighborhoods or in the larger community this summer to learn more about these same subjects or to practice these skills. Discuss how reinforcing school learning over the summer can help prepare students for school next year.
Family connection activities:
These two following activities use storytelling, an important form of literacy.
- Have students ask a family member at home to tell about something new that the student learned last summer, where they learned it, and who helped them learn it. Students can come back to the classroom to share these stories from their family member either in pairs or with the whole class.
- Invite parents or extended family members to come to the classroom and share their own special stories about something they or a family member learned over the summer when they were children. If the family member does not speak English, find an interpreter to come to class or see if someone in the class feels comfortable interpreting.
2. The Word Walk, a fun family literacy activity for the summer
Just before the summer vacation, have students brainstorm with their families about places they can visit together in their neighborhoods over the coming summer. Introduce the Word Walk family literacy activity to students and their families.
This activity is appropriate for students in third grade and younger. During this activity, parents or other adult family members and children can walk and learn in their neighborhood, and discover special places where literacy learning can occur. In addition to finding out those places where more formal learning can occur, such as a community center, families can also importantly discover those places where informal learning can occur, such as in a store reading labels. The Word Walk makes use of typical community settings as well as familial and cultural practices to reinforce literacy skills from the academic school year and help prevent the summer literacy slide.
Read about Rashmi Kumar's experience using Tomás and the Library Lady in her classroom in the teacher commentary.
Reference
Mora, P. (1997). Tomás and the library lady. New York: Knopf Books for Young Readers. Hardcover. Also available in paperback from Dragonfly Books, with editions in both English and Spanish (Tomás y la señora de la biblioteca).
Developed by Martha Kateri Ferede, Ed.M., 2006
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