Hayley CunninghamWOK Humanities- LAP 2

“Fly Away Home” by Eve Bunting

I. Content : Describe what is you will teach. What is the content?

In this lesson, students will be introduced to a connotation of home- home as an

emotional state or being. Students will be read aloud Fly Away Home by Eve Bunting about a

homeless boy and his father and engage in a discussion of whether a place can only be a home if

it’s in a house.

II. Learning Goal(s): Describe what specifically student will know and be able to do after the experience of this class.

Students will be able to use evidence from the text to support their opinion.

Students will build on the concept of home to include emotions.

Students will be able to argue whether a place can only be a home if it’s in a house.

Students will expand their thinking of what makes a home a home/what makes a home

special.

Students will become empathetic to those who are homelessness.

III. Rationale: Explain how the content and learning goal(s) relate to your Curriculum Unit Plan goals.

The overall goal of my unit is to get students thinking about the concept of home. More

specifically, what makes a home a home- is it the house itself or is it the people that are in the

house that make it special? Furthermore in this lesson, students will reflect on whether that home

actually needs to be in a house. This lesson aims to make those essential questions more apparent

to student. As they read Fly Away Home, they will uncover that it’s not a house that makes a

place a home, but rather the people that surround your everyday life. Hopefully, this will help

them become one step closer to understanding their own self-perceptions of home- what makes

their home special to them.

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Hayley CunninghamWOK Humanities- LAP 2

“Fly Away Home” by Eve Bunting

IV. Assessment: Describe how you and your students will know they have reached your learning goals.

The assessment for this lesson is informal. Throughout our discussions, I will continually

check for student engagement and participation. Students who do not participate will be held

accountable. Both students and I will both know they have reached my learning goals if they can

exhaust all potential discussion points.

V. Personalization and equity: Describe how you will provide for individual student strengths and needs. How will you and your lesson consider the needs of each student and scaffold learning? How specifically will ELL students and students with learning disabilities gain access and be supported?

Because this lesson consists solely of discussion, the language learners in my classroom

will have ample opportunities to enhance their oral capabilities. They will be given opportunities

to share their reasoning and to practice making it comprehensible. According to Gibbons,

students need to engage in substantive conversation. That is, they need to be involved in

extended talk around big ideas. The process of taking part in substantive conversations leads to

an increased understanding of subject content, since it creates space for students to explore new

ideas, clarify their understandings, initiate questions, and make their reasoning visible to peers

(Gibbons 25). Not only are students developing content understanding, but also they are

developing language skills. The opportunity for extended talk allows students a chance to

practice vocabulary and grammar and enhance their language development.

VI. Activity description and agenda: a. Describe the activities that will help your students understand the content of your

class lesson by creating an agenda with time frames for your class. Be prepared to explain why you think each activity will help students on the path toward understanding.

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Hayley CunninghamWOK Humanities- LAP 2

“Fly Away Home” by Eve BuntingTime Teacher Activity Student Activity Materials Needed

1-2 Minutes: Facilitate discussion on whether a home has to be in a house.

Turn in talk in pairs on whether a home has to be in a house. Try to come up with examples when a home doesn’t have to be in house.

10-30 Minutes Interactive read aloud:Fly Away Home by Eve Bunting

Discussion Questions: What are some

of the things that the boy and the dad do to not get caught living in the airport?

Do you think the airport is the boy’s home? Why/Why not?

What makes the airport home for the boy?

What’s the theme/central message of the story?

Actively listen to read aloud.

Turn & talk with a partner.Independently think about discussion questions.Engage in discussion.Monitor Understanding

Fly Away Home

30-40 Minutes Facilitate discussion:Does the boy have hope? What from the story leads you to believe he either has or does not have hope?

Probe students to think about the bird as a symbol of hope.

Engage in turn & talk/ whole group discussion.

Anchor Chart Paper

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Hayley CunninghamWOK Humanities- LAP 2

“Fly Away Home” by Eve Bunting

b. What particular challenges, in terms of student learning or implementing planned activity, do you anticipate and how will you address them?

A particular challenge that I anticipate is that some students may have been homeless at

one point in their life. I do not plan on ever using the term homeless throughout this lesson. If

students feel uncomfortable, there will be a backup activity for them to do with Because of Winn-

Dixie.

VII. List the Massachusetts Learning Standards this lesson addresses.

RL.4.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text; summarize the text

SL.4.1 Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 4 topics and texts, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly.

RL.4.1 Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

VIII. Reflection

a. In light of all areas of planning, but especially in terms of your stated purpose and learning goals, in what ways was the activity successful? How do you know? In what ways was it not successful? How might the activity be planned differently another time?

Overall, I thought this lesson was very successful. At the beginning of the lesson,

students couldn’t really pick up on the fact that a home doesn’t necessarily have to be in a house.

They focused more on the physical attributes of the house, such that it is a shelter that holds

food, water and clothes. This was my specific intention, as the previous lesson students studied

the physical attributes of a home. By the end of the lesson, students were able to pinpoint that a

home is a home because your family lives there.

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Hayley CunninghamWOK Humanities- LAP 2

“Fly Away Home” by Eve BuntingStudents were able to build empathy for the boy and his father. They were able to answer

text-dependent questions, such as what are some of the precautions that the boy and the dad take

to not get caught living in the airport? They were able to recognize that they wore blue clothes to

blend in and that they slept in different airport terminals to not get caught. For the most part,

students were engaged in the text and were able to exert self-control on the rug.

When students were asked to reflect on whether the bird and the boy were similar;

students were able to use turn and talks to effectively answer the question. I filtered through the

room and heard great conversations among students. When we came together as a whole class,

our discussion focused on how the boy and the bird were both trying to escape to go home. Many

students made a connection to a pigeon that got trapped in our classroom a couple of weeks ago,

which I thought was great! They saw the pigeon in our room struggle to get out the window so

they could connect that to the boy struggles since they had a first-hand connection. Furthermore,

students were able to really pinpoint that the bird was a symbol of hope (without saying it in

those words and without prompting). Many students said that they hoped the boy would be able

to escape the “window” and have a home with his dad.

In the end, students are exactly where I’d like them to be on the continuum to achieving

my unit goals. They understood that the airport was a home for the boy not because it was a

shelter, but because his dad and family friends were there with him. They were able to add

family and friends to our anchor chart (look in resource section). If I were able to implement this

lesson again, I would somehow like them to build a connection or reflect on their own families

and friends in order to get closer to my overarching goal: students self-perception of home.

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Hayley CunninghamWOK Humanities- LAP 2

“Fly Away Home” by Eve Buntingb. What did you learn from the experience of this lesson that will inform your next LAP?

From this lesson, I learned that my students are able to handle heavy topics such as

homelessness. My students exhibit an immense amount of empathy for people in difficult

situations and are able to maturely reflect on it. This makes me excited for our next book, A

Shelter in Our Car, which also addresses homelessness. I’m hoping that now that they have a

base understanding of the emotional aspect of home that they will be able to enhance

understanding and development with another book.

Anchor Chart:

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