Growing up, we have all read stories of changemakers like Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Sir Martin Luther King, and many others who have continued to inspire and to a large extent helped shape the world we live in today. But it is less often that primary school students read stories of young changemakers. Therefore, I have chosen three books written by diverse authors.

These books narrate stories of three brave children who have shown extreme courage to challenge political, economic, and social problems faced worldwide and more dominantly within some societies. These books are centered on global issues and showcase the struggles of three children growing up in very different socio-economic conditions.

Authors: William Kamkwamba & Bryan Mealer

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Autobiography, Science, Inspirational, School

This book narrates the story of a 14-year-old boy, William Kamkwamba and how he found a method to generate electricity in a small village in Malawi. Based in south-western Africa, it encapsulates the drought years in Malawi and how it led to a loss of life for over a 100,000 people in 2002. While his country was observing one of the most disastrous famines in the history of mankind, William had to quit school to support his family plough their land. After working hard on the fields, he would visit the library to learn more about a dream he had envisioned, which was about bringing electricity to his village. This led him on a quest to hunt for scrap materials which were required to build a windmill. As he embarked on his own project to solve the issue of electricity in his town, many of his neighbours presumed him as someone who had lost his mind. But William was destined to build a windmill and continued on this path until he was recognized by western journalists who invited him to speak at a Ted Talks convention in California.

This book reinforces the theme of gaining knowledge and how it can be utilized to enhance livelihood and if required promote change. Furthermore, it is an example of “Global literature”, which helps foster “respect” and promote acceptance for people from diverse backgrounds amongst the students (Martens et, al., 2015, p. 610).

Activity 1 – Let’s build a bicycle together!

This activity will focus on vocabulary and visual strategies to understand how to build a bicycle using literary, audio, and visual instructions. The aim of this activity is for students to become acquainted with the resources required to build a bicycle. I have chosen a bicycle as it is an everyday item of utility that students may use, yet not fully understand its mechanism. In addition, it aims to equip students with “media literacy” skills aimed at improving the overall understanding of media forms and techniques (Ontario, 2006, p. 103). I would then divide my students in groups of four and ask them to answer the following questions:

• What raw materials are required to build a bike?

After they have answered this question, we would watch a Youtube video explaining the students how they can build a bicycle from scratch and what raw materials are required for it. This initial understanding of building a bicycle would be reinforced through introduction of a visual text that informs them better about raw materials required to build a bicycle. For reasons of health and safety concern, I would use this classroom activity for my students to work with arts and crafts materials. Using scrap cardboard, Polystyrene sheets, markers, and sketch pens; the students would be asked to build their bicycle models and showcase it to the class.

To culminate this activity, the students would be asked to journal their own experience of learning about how to build a bicycle and comparing it to that of William Kamkwamba in a 250 word journal entry.

Connection(s) to the Curriculum

1. Language Curriculum

Oral Communication

1.7 – Analysing Texts - analyse oral texts in order to evaluate how well they communicate ideas, opinions, themes, and information

2.1 – Purpose - identify a variety of purposes for speaking and explain how the purpose and intended audience influence the choice of form

Reading

1.6 - Extending Understanding - extend understanding of oral texts by connecting the ideas in them to their own knowledge, experience, and insights; to other texts, including print and visual texts; and to the world around them.

Writing

1.5 - Organizing Ideas - identify and order main ideas and supporting details and group them into units that could be used to develop a structured, multi-paragraph piece of writing, using a variety of strategies

2.8 - Producing Drafts - produce revised draft pieces of writing to meet identified criteria based on the expectations

3.3 - Vocabulary - confirm spellings and word meanings or word choice using a variety of resources appropriate for the purpose

Media Literacy

4.1 - Metacognition - identify what strategies they found most helpful in making sense of and creating media texts, and explain how these and other strategies can help them improve as media viewers/ listeners/producers

4.2 – Interconnected Skills - explain how their skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing help them to make sense of and produce media texts

Activity 2 – Sketching to Learn

Through this activity, students learn how to work individually and bring forward their thought processes to communicate their ideas. It is a neat way of encouraging the artsy side of a student through having them think less about the idea of art and more about ideas and their real-time interpretations.

After listening to the audio version of the book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, I would ask students to sketch their imagination using coloured pencils and pens, water colours and cardstock or construction paper to interpret their idea. This activity would allow students to experiment with their verbal expression and their unique understanding of the book. It also demonstrates transferable skills from one learning medium to another.

Connection(s) to the Curriculum

1. Arts Curriculum

Students will develop understanding of the following elements of design:

· Colour

· Texture

· Space

D1. Creating and Presenting

D1.3 - use elements of design in art works to communicate ideas, messages, and understandings

D3. Exploring Forms and Cultural Contexts

D3.1 - identify and describe some of the ways in which art forms and styles reflect the beliefs and traditions of a variety of communities, times, and places

2. Language Curriculum

Oral Communication

1.2 - Active Listening Strategies - demonstrate an understanding of appropriate listening behaviour by adapting active listening strategies to suit a variety of situations, including work in groups

Reading

1.1 - Variety of Texts - read a variety of texts from diverse cultures, including literary texts

1.5 – Making Inferences/ Interpreting Texts - develop interpretations about texts using stated and implied ideas to support their interpretations

Author: Malala Yousafzai

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Autobiography, Feminism, Education, Society, Politics, Education, Inequality in Education

This book encapsulates the story of a 15-year-old schoolgirl named Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by Taliban, for speaking out against the political and social regime in north-western Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region. It takes the reader from Pakistan to the United Kingdom where Malala found refuge after fleeing her home country with her family. In this book, Malala describes the beautiful place that she used to call home being taken over by radical religious groups who support anti-modernization ideologies and are unsympathetic to equal rights for men and women.

Malala’s autobiography is a way to introduce the idea of courage in students. Furthermore, it is a way for my students to appreciate the strong values of equal education that Canadian society has developed. I view this book as an enabler to engage my students with topics of society, culture, and politics.

In addition, this book also serves the need to educate junior learners about young changemaker who stood up against one of the most ferocious political and religious groups in the world to protect the rights of her peoples.

Activity 1 - Guest Speaker in our Classroom

For my students to understand the inequalities and injustices faced by female-identifying students across the world, a guest speaker from Amnesty International Ottawa would be invited to our classroom to elaborate more on the topic of education. This activity would be structured with the attention span of junior Grade students, ideally at the Grade 6 level in mind and require the speaker to focus on improvements in education worldwide, after a succinct presentation of facts about gender discrimination in education.

The aim of this activity remains for students to empathize with Malala’s experience as a female student in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region. First, I would have them think individually about what they would have done after recovering from being shot by the Taliban, had they been in Malala’s situation. Additionally, I would use “Think, Pair, and Share” as a classroom activity to learn my student’s point of view by posing the following questions (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2002, p.53-54).

• What did you learn from Amnesty International’s presentation?
• How can the issue of discrimination in education towards female students be resolved?

Connection(s) to the Curriculum

1. Language Curriculum

Oral Communication

1.2 - Active Listening Strategies - demonstrate an understanding of appropriate listening behaviour by adapting active listening strategies to suit a variety of situations, including work in groups

2.3 – Clarity and Coherence - communicate orally in a clear, coherent manner, using appropriate organizing strategies and formats to link and sequence ideas and information

2.6 – Non-Verbal Cues - identify a variety of non-verbal cues, including facial expression, gestures, and eye contact, and use them in oral communications, appropriately and with sensitivity towards cultural differences, to help convey their meaning

Reading

1.1 – Variety of Texts - read a wide variety of texts from diverse cultures, including literary texts

1.5 – Making Inferences/ Interpreting Texts - develop interpretations about texts using stated and implied ideas to support their interpretations

Media Literacy

1.3 – Responding to and Evaluating Texts - evaluate the effectiveness of the presentation and treatment of ideas, information, themes, opinions, issues, and/or experiences in media texts

Activity 2 - Make a Collage

In this activity, students will be put in groups of 3-4 depending on the class size to collectively create a paper collage. The students would be required to use the crafts material like old magazines, brochures, newspapers, and old photos to construct a scene depicting a day at school in Pakistan from their memories of the picture book.

I would encourage the students to use this as an oppurtunity to showcase their voice through their art pieces. It would allow them to depict Malala’s story in their own colour combinations, as well as help them put forward their own voice as a young person.

1. Arts Curriculum

D1. Creating and Presenting

D1.3 - use elements of design in art works to communicate ideas, messages, and understandings

D1.4 - use a variety of materials, tools, techniques, and technologies to determine solutions to design challenges (e.g., mixed media: create a collage that uses a limited colour palette by cutting, pasting, and layering to combine images, symbols, textured papers, and text about consumerism or cultural pride)

2. Language Curriculum

Media Literacy

1.3 - Responding to and Evaluating Texts - evaluate the effectiveness of the presentation

and treatment of ideas, information, themes, opinions, issues, and/or experiences in media texts

Author: Valentina Camerini, Moreno Giavannoni (Translation), Veronica Carratello (Illustrations)

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Environment, Climate Change, Science, Activism, Children

Greta’s Story is a narrative of a 16-year-old Swedish teenager who has taken up climate activism as her right to protect the planet Earth. In this book, Greta talks about why she has resorted to climate activism as she argues with the political elite around the world. This book was launched in summer 2019, found more space in school classrooms since the start of the pandemic as educators realized the need for climate action more than ever.

This book is a beautiful way to engage the junior learner to become acquainted with Greta Thunberg’s point of view and how ‘we’ as a species have gotten this far, ultimately to describe our human footprint as a fight against climate. The illustrations in this book capture the very essence of being a climate activist, which would provide a junior learner to learn new vocabulary related to the environment.

Most importantly, this book showcases a young changemaker, one who has made climate action her solemn duty in the hope to bring climate justice to the future generations.

Activity 1 – Fridays for Future Climate Strike

Since this book is centered around climate change and advocates the need to protect the environment, it is reasonable that my students understand the term climate activism. It is also important they understand how climate activism came to be the global phenomenon that youth around the world has grown up around.

After reading the book, I would ask students to form groups and prepare a short slogan they think would best represent the needs of reducing greenhouse gases across Canada. I would use the previous lesson to help them brainstorm ideas about ways they could as individuals help reduce their carbon footprint. In this lesson, students learn key vocabulary about environmental literacy and get acquainted with concepts like climate activism, recycling, upcycling, greenwashing, and green choices to help them understand that choices made at a micro level can help create a change at a macro level.

On September 24, with the permission of their parents and school principal, I would join the climate action strike with my students to give them a chance to use their slogans, if they volunteer to do so.

Connection(s) to the Curriculum

1. Language Curriculum

Oral Communication

1.6 - Extending Understanding - extend understanding of oral texts by connecting the ideas in them to their own knowledge, experience, and insights; to other texts, including print and visual texts; and to the world around them

3.2 – Interconnected Skills - identify, in conversation with the teacher and peers, how their skills as viewers, representers, readers, and writers help them improve their oral communication skills

Reading

1.1 – Variety of Texts - read a variety of texts from diverse cultures, including literary texts

Activity 2 – What’s Going on in this picture?

This book is beautifully illustrated by Veronica Carratello and I would like to utilize the visual illustrations images to ask my students what they see is going on in the different picture illustrations in this book. This would be done to enhance their interest in visual literacies and for those who learn less visually, to acquire the meaning behind photos. While we read the book together, I would ask them to be reflective about the images they encounter in the book, like the ones on pages 6 and 7, which illustrate Greta’s decision to go on a climate strike (Camerini, 2019, p. 6-7). I would ask them to work in pairs to answer the following questions:

• What is going on in this picture?
• Why do you think so?
• What are some themes observed in the picture?
• What else can you see in this picture?

Connection(s) to the Curriculum

1. Language Curriculum

Reading

1.1 – Variety of Texts - read a variety of texts from diverse cultures, including literary texts

1.2 – Purpose - identify a variety of purposes for reading and choose reading materials appropriate for those purposes

1.4 – Demonstrating Understanding - demonstrate understanding of increasingly complex texts by summarizing and explaining important ideas and citing relevant supporting details (e.g., general idea and related facts in chapters, reports, tables and charts, concept maps, online and print magazine articles, editorials, brochures or pamphlets, websites; main theme and important details in short stories, poems, plays, legends)

2. Arts Curriculum

D2. Reflecting, Responding, and Analysing

D2.1 - interpret a variety of art works and identify the feelings, issues, themes, and social concerns they convey

D2.3 - demonstrate an understanding of how to read and interpret signs, symbols, and style in art works

D3. Exploring Forms and Cultural Contexts

D3.1 - identify and describe some of the ways in which art forms and styles reflect the beliefs and traditions of a variety of communities, times, and places

Books

• Camerini, V. (2019). Greta’s Story: The Schoolgirl Who Went on Strike to Save the Planet. New York, NY: Aladdin.
• Kamkwamba, W. & Mealer, B. (2012). The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. New York, NY: Dial Books.
• Yousafzai, M. (2018). Malala: My Story of Standing Up for Girls’ Rights. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Curriculum document(s)

• Ontario Ministry of Education (2009) The Arts Curriculum, K-8.
• Ontario Ministry of Education (2006). Language Curriculum, K-8.
• Ontario Ministry of Education (2002). Teaching/ Learning Companion.

Journal Article(s)

• Dwyer, B. (2016). Teaching and learning in the Global Village: Connect, create, collaborate, and communicate. The Reading Teacher, 70(1), 131-136.
• Harste (2014). The art of learning to be critically literate. Language Arts, 92, 90-102.
• Martens, P., et al. (2015). Building intercultural understandings through global literature. The Reading Teacher, 68(8), pp. 609–617.