New Gold Mountain #3

Unfortunately, I found it too difficult to keep up with regular posts about our unit on the book "New Gold Mountain" by Christopher W. Cheng. Instead, I am offering some suggestions for the activities that I found useful. Please also check New Gold Mountain #1 and New Gold Mountain #2 for earlier posts.

Learn to play Fan Tan - The Chinese miners regularly played Fan Tan, a card game, and often gambled away their new-found wealth. We had a few games and came to realise how noisy the game could be and how easily it could lead to frustration and arguments - especially if money was involved!

Letters back to China - In the book one of the characters writes a letter back to his village in China. He doesn't tell the truth about his situation given that he has gambled away all his gold playing Fan Tan! Students wrote two letters back to China: one painting a rosy picture of the situation, and one giving a more honest account.

Character Comparison - As a class we made a Venn Diagram to illustrate the similarities and differences between Rowan (of Rin) and Shu Cheong. Students became really engaged in this activity and sought out lots of great examples of similarities. When we had finished brainstorming, students wrote the comparison in essay form. I gave them an introductory paragraph and then helped them to work through a structure for following paragraphs. We thought of some useful phrases for beginning paragraphs: 'An important similarity is...' 'Yet another similarity is...' 'Both Rowan and Shu Cheong...' We also thought of some comparison connectives (I'm sure they have a proper name) like 'whereas', 'while', 'however', 'although', 'but', 'and', 'whilst'.

Historical Diary - I already mentioned that students created a diary entry from the perspective of a convict. Later in the unit we repeated this activity with students writing from the perspective of an explorer of their choice. I borrowed a huge pile of non-fiction texts about explorers from the library. Students were given about 30 minutes to research their explorer and take some notes. They then moved into small groups focused on the same explorer to share the knowledge they had uncovered. After this sharing time students went back to working independently and created their diary entries. They were given more time to work on this in future lessons.

Final Weeks - In the final weeks I wanted to give students a chance to take charge of their learning and self-manage their tasks. Students needed to complete the reading of the text and review, edit and publish one of their written pieces from the term so that we could compile them into a class book. Students responded well to this and most completed both tasks by the due date.


Thoughts on the unit...
This was a great book to use as part of our study of Australian History as it helped students to consider the non-European perspective. It provided us with an opportunity to discuss racism and to form arguments against racism.
I enjoyed introducing students to historical fiction and found the diary format an easy way for students to dabble with writing historical fiction for themselves.

New Gold Mountain #2

This week my literacy class continued reading New Gold Mountain: The Diary of Shu Cheong by Christopher W. Cheng. This is an historical fiction which is part of the "My Australian Story" series. It tells the story of life on the goldfields at Lambing Flat, NSW in 1860-1861. Shu Cheong, a fictitious character travels to Australia to find gold to take back to his village. On the journey both his father and third uncle die, leaving Shu Cheong alone in a foreign country. The local Chinese Society arrange a foster parent (Uncle) for Shu Cheong.
Details of pages 1-30

Summary of Pages 30-70
In these pages we learn more about life on the goldfields and see an increase in the tension between the European and Chinese miners. After a confrontation with one of the Chinese miners who was mining in an abandoned European mine, the European miners drive the Chinese out and they are stranded in the bush, surviving on what plants and bugs they can find. On their return to the goldfields they need to purchase new tools and get themselves set up again. Life continues as normal until again they are forced from their tents.

Activities
Reading: The reading part of this unit is done in a variety of ways: teacher reading to the class, students reading to the class, students reading in pairs or independently. While students are reading, I sit alongside them and ask questions and/or make anecdotal notes about fluency/expression/self-correction etc.

Code Breaker: Continue to build the vocabulary chart and discuss new words as they are encountered in the text.

Text User: Consider first-person perspective in historical fiction. Students work in teams to collect information about convicts and their lives from books (20mins). Students sit in a big circle. Each contributes one fact they learnt from their research so that everyone can benefit from their knowledge. Students then begin writing a diary entry from the perspective of a convict.

Text Participant: Students write their names using Chinese script (see lesson here).

Text Analyst: Students discuss the bullying of the Chinese and consider how it would feel to be in their position. Students share own experiences of being burgled. Explain the difference that having insurance makes - in those days they lost everything and had to start from scratch (15 mins). Students then read factual recounts of the treatment of the Chinese on the goldfields. They highlight relevant passages and share this with the class in a discussion (25 mins). Students then work independently to write speeches from the perspective of a Chinese miner or European miner trying to convince the other European miners to stop harrassing the Chinese. Use Jenny Eather's Writing Fun page on Persuasive writing as a guide. On completion, students who wish to can present their speech to the class. (We recorded these with the Flip Mino to share on our My Classes page).
From a Quality Teaching Model perspective, this lesson was great for developing deep knowledge and deep understanding, using higher order thinking, allowing for substantive communication, and improving problematic knowledge through seeing things from the various perspectives.