overview

**2010-2011**   **//Guiding Question: How do people make their neighborhood a good place to live?//**
 * Boston Neighborhoods Year Plan**

**September (Neighbors and Community)**

Guiding Questions:

o Use this to write class promises and build community. o Use the classroom / school as the first community we study.
 * What makes a good neighbor?
 * When good neighbors build a community, what do they want to have in their community?

Activities:

§ Create anchor charts of what makes a good neighbor and what good neighbors want to have in their communities, to continue to add to all year. § Chez Vous – perseverance / community § Mantra project as intro to drafting – students compose a mantra, create an image of something that helps them do hard things, draft a quilt square § Fieldwork in the school building, to collect evidence of what people want to have in their community: practice for neighborhood field trips in terms of listening, collecting evidence, behavior. § Write class promises.

**October (The City – an overview)**

Guiding Questions:

§ What is the difference between the whole city and the neighborhoods that are in the city? § Why do people make neighborhoods?

Activities:

§ Make a map of your neighborhood (no direction, very open-ended) § Map each student’s address on a map of Boston. § Prudential Field Trip: practice with how to behave in the community § Use a [|city map with the neighborhoods marked]: here is the whole city (that we saw from the Pru) – here are the neighborhoods. Why do people make neighborhoods in the city? o Discussion questions: What is a neighborhood? Is the school a neighborhood? Why not? What is the difference between a neighborhood and a community? – smaller, manageable places where people can get what they need § Go outside with the class and point: “Roxbury is this way, JP is that way, if you kept going you’d get to Brookline.” (Put chalk arrows on the ground pointing in different directions with labels, kids go look for their own neighborhood. “What neighborhood is our school in? What neighborhood is Roxbury Crossing in?” They all go the arrows.  § Get t-shirts with kids’ neighborhoods on them to wear on field trips.

**November (Neighborhood walks)**

Guiding Questions:

§ What makes a neighborhood a good place to be? How do people make their neighborhood a good place to be? (What is the good news about our neighborhoods? – there isn’t a lot of good news about our neighborhoods, so we are making a radio show about what makes our neighborhoods a good place to be.)

Activities:

§ To teach this, pick one thing we found that makes our school a good place to live, and we //all// use that artifact and draw it. Teacher models how to do a good piece of art / writing of an artifact. Then everyone goes to do it. Do a piece of shared writing about it as the description. (OR do this after the first neighborhood walk as an example) § Neighborhood walks (fieldwork): o Jackson Square / Hyde Square o Forest Hills? o These walks are also practice for going to other neighborhoods; stress the importance of being professional, collecting evidence, listening, following directions § Collect evidence of what makes each neighborhood a good place to live; create a huge anchor chart that we will add to all year. § After each trip, students pick one artifact they connected to most, and that represents “good news” for the neighborhood, and re-create it using different media. They build, model, draw, etc, and do some short writing about their artifact. This goes in their portfolio. Give lots of choice: they have to have a plan and know what materials they are going to use. (Like free choice time) o Students play the role of a reporter and do video-taped interviews of them talking about their artifacts § In an HOUR the next day at writing, they write a description of what they built. Describe what it is, how you connected to it, how it makes the neighborhood a good place to live.

**December (Science only)** Some graphing / data collection – connect to math data unit o Collect data from other grades about what neighborhoods they are from. Make a graph for the class that you collected data about o Make displays: here is the good news about the neighborhoods you are from!

**January (Chinatown)**

Guiding Questions:

§ What makes Chinatown a good place to be? How do the residents of Chinatown make their neighborhood a good place to be? § How do people work to Chinatown a fairer place to live?

Activities:

§ Revisit anchor chart of a good neighborhood and sort; come up with over-arching categories / rubric as a class, ie: o Community (people do things together) o Activism (people work to make their neighborhood a fairer place to live) o Basic Needs (people can get what they need to live) o Identity / Culture (people can be who they really are) o Art, language, food, activism, play and nature § Story-teller comes in to talk about Chinatown, and we re-tell the story as a class book, Readers’ Theater, and/or timelines (connects to standards.) o Who will be the good storyteller? One of the people we interviewed 2 years ago? § Chinatown fieldwork: look for evidence of what makes it a good neighborhood, using o Activism o Food o Language o Art o Learning o Play and nature § Choose an artifact and re-create / build it for your portfolio o Connect to inference: what do you infer about the neighborhood from your artifact? § After Chinatown, continue work on rubric of what makes a neighborhood a good place to live.

**February (Villa Victoria)**

Guiding Questions:

§ What makes Villa Victoria a good place to be? How do the residents of Villa Victoria make their neighborhood a good place to be? § How do the residents of Villa Victoria work to make their neighborhood a fairer place to live?

Activities:

§ Similar to Chinatown: story-teller comes; we retell the story with timelines (connects to standards) (get Luana and / or Jose) § Fieldwork in Villa: really use our rubric to “score” the neighborhood § Students represent one artifact for their portfolios

**March (Mattapan / service projects)**

Guiding Questions:

§ What does our school’s neighborhood have that makes it a good place to live and work? § What does our school’s neighborhood need to make it a fairer, better place to live and work? § How can we fight to make our school’s neighborhood a fairer, better place to live and work?

Activities:

§ Fieldwork in Mattapan: collecting data / evidence about the neighborhood, to use against our rubric § Interviews of residents? Senior citizens? About what the neighborhood has and what it needs (these are the stories) § Students choose an artifact to represent for their portfolio § Students choose a service project to do for the community: o Writing a letter must be part of it (to Mayor Menino, Charles Yancey, the editor, etc.) – goes in portfolio o Signs for the streets, PSA-style, etc. (write-up goes in portfolio)

**April (Culminating Presentation Prep)**

Guiding Questions:

§ How does my artifact make the neighborhood a good place to be? § How can I tell and show people why my artifact is important to the neighborhood and to me? § How does my artifact connect to the (hi)story of the neighborhood?

Activities:

§ Choose one artifact from your portfolio to focus on. § Non-fiction writing project about your artifact. § Drafting / feedback process for non-fiction writing and for drawing. § Rehearsal: fluency and expression § Recording radio show

**May (Culminating Presentation)**

Guiding Questions:

§ Why did we learn about neighborhoods all year? § What did I get better at? What did I work hard at? What was hard for me? What am I most proud of? What did I learn?

Activities:

§ Reflection § Rehearsal § Presentation