Childrens Book Lesson Plan

Chris Thomas

Critical Multicultural Ed

Dr Gleason

November 5th 2018

Diversity Lesson Plan

1. Encounter by Jane Yolen tells the true story of Christopher Columbus from the perspective of a young Arawak boy.  From the first encounter he warns the aldermen to not accept Columbus as a guest.  With dark and eerie illustrations the book portrays foreshadowing for when Columbus turns on the indians in his quest for gold.   One of the book's major theme was the cultural differences.  Further in the story the boy is kidnapped but escapes off of the English ship and warns other tribes about Columbus but to no avail.  The book ends with the boy grown up as an old man in english garb talking about how slowly they were used and assimilated into english society.  
2. An activity I would teach with this book in PE would be using it in educational gymnastics.  Educational Gymnastics incorporates locomotor movements, rolls, and balances and for my activity I would task the students with creating a story of their perceived story of Christopher Columbus using a combination of the skills listed above.  Then I would read the book to them and compare their story to the one from the text and then create a new story based of the text.  
3. This would be a great activity to teach to a middle school group around Columbus day, what I would want my students to get out of this is that we always have an biased perception based on how we were raised and taught. Since our knowledge is based off of what we are taught I expect that different classes might know or not know the true story of Columbus.  In the debrief I would talk about how we always have an opinion about different cultures based on the way we were raised and I would challenge my students to try and not go off their bias and look at people for who they are and not judge based off their culture.