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The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.
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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
Before Reading Tomás and the Library Lady With Your Class
You can begin by brainstorming with your students, using the following prompts:
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:
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:
Integrated Learning Idea:
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Discussion questions for the second third of the book:
Discussion questions for the last third of the book:
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:
Family connection activities:
These two following activities use storytelling, an important form of literacy.
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.
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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Published by Harvard Family Research Project