Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace
Author: Mary Hoffman
Illustrator: Caroline Binch
Realistic Fiction

Amazing Grace is the tale of a young girl who loves to tell stories, and play the role of her favorite characters. One day, Grace finds out that her class is going to do a performance of Peter Pan. Grace wants to try out for Peter Pan, but her friends tell her she can't because she is a girl, and African American. Feeling deflated, Grace goes home to her Nana and tells her all about her horrible day. Her Nana inspires Grace by taking her to see a ballet, and tells her than she can do anything. Grace decides to try out for the play after all, giving a wonderful performance. Of course, she gets the part of Peter Pan, and all of her friends tell her how great she was at the auditions. In the end, Grace stays true to herself and shows others that she is capable of doing whatever she puts her mind to.

Classroom Application/Reflection:
I used this book with my class of 3rd grade students to teach a lesson about gender roles. After reading Amazing grace, the class discussed whether it was ok for girls to like boy things, and boys to like girl things. We also discussed some of our favorite story characters, realizing that girls sometimes liked male protagonists, and males sometimes liking females. They seemed to connect with Grace, and all agreed that people should do what they want and should not feel pressured to act a certain way because of their gender. Students then participated in a WebQuest I created specifically for this lesson, where they learned about other important people in history who broke the mold like Grace did. Afterwards, students were given paper to design a poster for school play auditions that were encouraging to people of all gender, age, race, or socio-economic status. Overall the lesson went very well. The students were really excited about not only doing a group project, but also being able to use laptops. My SBTE is more on the traditional side and does not usually have technology applications for her lessons. I was unsure of whether she would be up for the challenge of a large lesson such as this, but it worked very well. At the end of the lesson she even commented on how the students were really engaged, provided lots of feedback during discussion and produced high quality work. I would love to try this lesson again seeing how much they liked it.

Ideas for this lesson were collected from:
http://www.dcmp.org/guides/10045.pdf

See the full lesson plan that I implemented here, including a link to the WebQuest:
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AcvxAeISuG7qZGR2cnMzMmtfMzJnZjdndnpmcg&hl=en