Viewing a Story from Multiple Perspectives

I can't believe that I haven't blogged in almost 3 weeks. But the month of October is always super hectic. Things haven't really slowed down, but I wanted to share something that my students have been doing in class.

Let me start by saying that I'm not usually into creating profits that require a lot cutting and glueing. I kinda feel as if they aren't necessary and take way to much time for the students to complete the work. However, this year I set a few goals and one of them was to allow my students more opportunities to be creative. I have done a pretty good hub with this so far, but I am right about the time it takes to complete products such as this.

Anyway, the Common Core emphasizes how important it is to use the same text for multiple reasons to help children build a deeper understanding of the text. So, we read the story Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters for the third time this school year. Here is what we did when we read it the first time.

Well, we have been learning about author's point of view. After learning the difference between first and third person points of view, we then went into a discussion about how changing the narrator would change the story. This required my scholars to really do some deep thinking. I'm sure many of them had never thought about anything similar to this.

After I reread Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters, I had them think about how the story would differ if it was told from the point of view of one of the 4 main characters: Mufaro, Manyara, Nyasha, or Nyoka. After a quick think, pair, share, I gave them the assignment.

Select two of the characters and retell the story from both characters' point of view, paying close attention to how the two stories would be different.

Then came the artsy part. We created hand lenses so it looked like the reader was viewing the two stories through them. Here is the final product.

Even though it took many of them several days to complete, it was a valuable activity for my class.


I knew that I would be hanging this product out in the hall, which means it had to be edited. (At my school, all work displayed in the hall must be edited and represent the students' best work.) This meant that I had to edit all of them, which took me forever. Here is a list of common errors that my scholars made:

- Using capital letters in the middle of sentences
- Beginning sentences with lowercase letters
- Using a lowercase I when writing the word
- Subject/verb agreement
- Lack of periods

How do you teach conventions in your classroom? How do you hold your students accountable for using proper conventions?

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