This unit was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 2nd Grade ELA in Speaking & Listening.

There is no one poem that represents the experience of African Americans in the United States, yet the history of racism in this country is seared deeply into the lives of many African Americans. “The Weakness” by Toi Derricotte recounts an experience with racism through the eyes of a young, light-skinned African American girl going shopping with her grandmother in a department store in 1945. The poems in The African American Experience offer a number of perspectives from African American poets that add a rich complexity to students’ perceptions of African American lives.

In this lesson, students complete two prewriting activities, one on brainstorming ideas using story maps, and one on creating beginnings of stories. They then work on two collaborative-writing activities in which they draft an "oversized" story on chart paper. Each student works individually to read what has been written before, adds the "next sentence," and passes the developing story on to another student. The story is passed from student to student until the story is complete. In a later lesson Collaborative Stories 2: Revising, the story is revised by the groups.

In this activity, students will explore five different "Discovery Buckets." These buckets will give them opportunities to practice expressing both their thoughts and feelings.

In this unit, students will become aware of the importance of retelling and essential story elements through teacher modeling and progressive levels of independent work. Students demonstrate their understanding of stories through the use of online interactive graphic organizers and present story elements of an individual book through a book talk.