First Crossing

Welcome to my travelogue! This is my first time blogging, so you can say that this is my "first crossing" into this new land, this journey that we are all about to embark on. This week, I accomplished something very big that I have been working on for over a year now. I teach at a middle school, and one of my responsibilities is to create the reading curriculum for our school-wide reading program. I create a workbook that corresponds to a novel for each grade level each nine weeks. As we enter this multicultural society, I have been wanting to create a workbook that focuses on the diversity that exists. I found the book, "First Crossing," a book of 10 stories by different authors in which each story tells the struggles and hopes of 10 different immigrants of different cultures as they first crossed the border into the United States. The workbook I created has comprehension questions for each story in the novel, news articles relating to diversity in the United States, videos, multicultural activities, and much more. The eighth grade students just completed their first week using the workbook, and already the feedback is positive.