Using Popular Culture Texts to Enhance Literacy Learning

Chapter 6

Trading Cards to Comic Strips
Xu, Perkins, and Zunich

Mary’s comment that she needs to keep informed about student’s literacy interests outside of school is important. Because this can be the driving force in motivating the children’s literacy work. I suggest that another way to collect this information about what children like besides show and tell would be a questionnaire that the children fill out.

It is interesting to note that although this book was written by Xu, Perkins, and Zunich in 1964, I have noticed several of our classroom children’s conversations that link to the literacies of Yu-Gi-Oh cards and movies, Pokemon, and Japanese animations or (anime). One child had drawn his own Yu-Gi-Oh character on a card and had given it characteristics. I will have to admit that I am not very knowledgeable about these topics presently but now I have new motivation to learn about it.

I think that a motivating activity for our class would be to make trading cards for either their characters that they study in the Wyoming History fiction books or for the Mountain Men they are writing about. This could be a culminating activity of a unit.

While looking at Webs sites last week, I discovered the Website with the planets and solar system trading cards. These would be fun to print out in color and have students add the important information about each.

Shelly wanted ideas of how I could do something differently than in the text. What I would suggest is to use the movie “Cinderfellow,an old Jerry Lewis Movie and compare that to the Cinderella stories.

I liked the ways that U WYO student teachers used modern literacies by teaching the “Literature Circles” on the internet program using camera’s, microphones, and children from two schools.

The different types of questions that are available in this textbook would be helpful in preparing for different kinds of Literacy experiences, too. Questions regarding “researchers of language”, guiding questions, deep viewing questions, considering other perspective questions, and finally questions regarding “My Idol” are excellent resources to have available.

After watching an old movie The Sahara, I would be able to look the question lists over in the text book and select the questions that fit it. The theme is about a woman Dr. in Africa who finds people dying and discovers that the cause was a poisoned water supply. There were treasure hunters in that area searching for treasure. They joined forces and solved the problem. The set of questions that I selected for this movie were the Lester (1995) set of questions.

I wrote a summary of this article but then decided to write about the ways that I could use the information instead.