Updates: New School Books, Tom Piazza at Loyola, 2nd Writing Contest

Here are a few updates.

We are using these two new books at our school now on a regular basis in our small group classes -- see photo. The first is City of Refuge, the new novel by Tom Piazza about Hurricane Katrina. The book was this year's selection by the One Book One New Orleans project (OBONO).

Tom spoke at Nunemaker Hall at Loyola University on Thursday, Nov. 13th to a very thrilled and diverse audience. Students from Dillard University and Loyola University attended as well as many locals. Tom read selected passages from his novel, answered questions, and signed books. The event was sponsored by OBONO and the Literacy Alliance of Greater New Orleans and the Lindy Boggs Center for Literacy. Our own Literacy*AmeriCorps New Orleans group, directed by Sarah Fischer, helped out as well.


The second book is the Teacher/Tutor Guide for City of Refuge. It was written by Rachel Nicolosi of the Literacy Alliance GNO, Shannan Cvitanovic of YMCA Educational Services, and me. We use the Guide to help our students develop their literacy skills while reading selected passages from Tom's book. We stress vocabulary, grammar, and --most importantly-- reading comprehension. To enhance comprehension, we include discussion questions and topic suggestions for student essay writing about the book or Katrina in general. At SVDP-ALC I hold small group classes usually twice per week, and we have been and will continue to cover material from City of Refuge and the Teacher/Tutor Guide.

I devised a method called "familiar words" for the Guide wherein students locate names of persons, places, or things in the book they are familiar with. They write down the page numbers where they find the words, then read aloud in group the sentences where the words are located, then the paragraphs. Then we discuss the meaning of the sentences. I find that the "familar words" method is quite popular with our students, and it can be used as a basis for student essay writing too.

As you know, if you follow our blog, last month we had our first ever SVDP-ALC Student Writing Contest. It was a great success and was based on the totally fantastic work of our great pen pal from South Pole Station, Antarctica, John Miller of the U.S. Antarctic Program. The students wrote about John's adventure of staying overnight in the Amundsen-Scott tent replica at South Pole. (You can read all about this in earlier entries on this blog.) We will soon begin our second writing contest which will be based on Tom Piazza's book City of Refuge. We are still in the process of planning this contest, but it will be coming soon. So, stay tuned.
--Adrian