I Am Malala .......Student Art Work....

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Who Is Malala-The story that continues to Continue.....

I first exposed my students to Malala Yousafzai's story with a packet I created from a few articles from the web, interspersed with questions I created. I added images, as I always do and some important background information they desperately needed. Also, an article on the Taliban, to describe the terrorist group who was responsible for the attack on her. A prior knowledge question proved that not one of my 28 students knew who Malala was. None knew about the Nobel Peace Prize. Only one had heard of the Taliban.

I was shocked, as I always am, that with so much information about this topic in our news daily, and their instruction in social studies classes, that they were clueless. Thus began what I believed would be a 4 day assignment at best....which turned into several weeks now. We read and answered questions. We created notes. We watched the ABC 20/20 Diane Sawyer special-Who Is Malala, and continued to develop notes. We organized those notes using graphic organizers in preparation for writing a 5 paragraph essay. We completed an 'Art Connected To Text" assignment where students would take a Big Idea and present it in an artistic form adding in Big Idea words. Finally, we are in the midst of the Persuasive/Argumentative essay. The essay is tedious at best. None have ever done such an assignment. They all want to dive into the story as a summary. This has been quite the challenge and I've modified the Painted Essay to be a 5 paragraph essay model, shifting some of the colors and maybe stirring some feathers also. This has been quite the adventure...and we are not even close to being done....but we are not stopping until we reach our destination...

My students keep saying, "This is hard!!" and I reply, "Yes it is, but we are getting there." Sometimes I am not sure....other times I am charged up and believing...'I think they can...I think they can....."

Their artistic representations floor me...I love them and each of them spoke volumes not with their voices but with their art...