Post #3 Visualizing Understanding: Homesick: My Own Story by Jean Fritz

Part I:

Here is my Visualization Project on Immigration. It is a voice-thread about some of the big ideas from the book, "Homesick: My Own Story" by Jean Fritz.

Part II: 

Post #3, Visualizing Understanding, was the most challenging blog posting assignment for me. I thought about all of the things that the students would have learned from the texts that we would have studied when chose Jean Fritz’s story, “Homesick: My Own Story.” I wanted something that would deepen their understanding of immigration and see it from another angle. I thought that learning about how the Chinese people in the story acted toward and spoke to the American people was a good comparison to how the American people here spoke about the Chinese people. I think that it was also a good choice to relate the way people feel about immigration today.

The first thing that I did was reread the book. I had read it when it first came out in 1982 or so. When I first thought of using this book, I didn’t think that I would have to read it again. I remembered the gist of it, and I felt like that would be enough information to make a voice thread about some of the immigration related topics in the book I tried to visualize how I would proceed with this project, but I didn’t have a clear enough picture. Rereading the book finally helped to give some shape to the task at hand.

Visualizing understanding deepened my understanding of this subject very much. I had to know it very well in order to be able to do this project. Every picture chosen and every word came after further research into my subject. When I read the book I put little post-it notes on subjects of interest, so after I finished the book I went back and thought about the ones that were the most important and the ones that I thought would impact my 7^th graders the most. I wanted to give them information about it, but above all, I wanted to spark their interest, so they will continue learning. There is so much to learn about this time period, immigration, and how we think about things. I want my students to be metacognitive about their beliefs and how they interpret the world. I very much want them to know what ethnocentric means, so they can monitor their own minds and make the world a better place.

Reading this book alone would have been beneficial to my students, and they would have learned some new things, but reading it and then studying little pieces of it with this voice thread gave it more meaning. It took them away from Jean, the main character, and directed their concentration to the circumstances that shaped Jean’s experiences and history leading up to today. It greatly deepened my comprehension as well because I had to learn as more than I thought I had to in order to present it in a clear and organized way. This assignment showed me the huge benefits of having my future students do projects using different ways to present the material and to visualize what they have learned. 

Fritz, Jean, and Margot Tomes. Homesick: My Own Story. New York: G.P. Putnam's 

Sons, 1982. Print.