We read a section of Virginia Hamilton's speech "Looking for America" to find out how she finds ideas for her stories. In it, she speaks about how her life experiences (growing up on a farm, riding the bus or her bike to school, watching birds) lead her to describe her world in a narrative fashion. Students discussed the speech and the background of the author, and most were able to articulate an understanding of the metaphoric meaning of the title.
As an alternative to an end-of-class reading quiz, I asked my students to roll our class "Comprehension Cube" and use that to prompt their responses to the speech. In my second period class, the cube landed on "Visualize" and I told students they could sketch or describe a section of the speech that really helped them to visualize the author's ideas. Many chose to illustrate her travels to school in a muddy bus or on her red bicycle. Some vividly depicted the birds she saw in their hierarchical strata. As I circulated the classroom, I was fairly confident that most of my students understood the speech and the significance of Hamilton's past experiences.
Still, that evening, as I graded, I couldn't help but laugh at Elijah's visualization. He sketched a curly-haired woman in a canoe pointing at an outline of the country of America. His caption simply read, "Virginia Hamilton looking for America."
At least I know that he has been paying attention in the map unit of his social studies class.
