Stories!

Our sixth-grade students read When You Trap a Tiger over the summer, which is essentially the story of two Korean girls in California who, along with their widowed mother, move to Washington to live with their grandmother, who is ill. The novel focuses on the stories told by Halmoni, the grandmother, that illustrate who Halmoni and her granddaughters really are and what it means to live a consequential and significant life.

 

We will use the first few days of the term to discuss the book, and then use the novel as a springboard to launch our first unit of the year, an investigation of the short story. Each one of the stories the students read will have an underlying theme of social justice and equality, our school theme for the year. The unit will include a variety of classic and contemporary stories. 

 

Our vocabulary study will correspond to the unfamiliar words we find in the literature we read, and written expression will focus on writing original narratives and personal memoirs. 

 

The stories we create as we live our lives become the history of our existence!