INSTRCUCTIONS FOR EXPLORING PRINT CULTURE

Historically, Native Americans took on the identity of wild animals to increase their personal power and ability. Your job, today, is to investigate characteristics of mountain lions as a means to begin to think about the ways that we are represented (and the ways we represent) ourselves as Nittany Lions.

Nittany Lion (some search terms that might be helpful)

·      Mountain lion

·      Cougar

·      Panther

·      Puma

·      Felis Concolor

Today we are going to do some explorations of Mountain Lions by finding sources that we can use in our classroom. Think of it this way…if you were going to do a project on Nittany Lions with young children, we would want to have lots of stuff to look at. We would want to have books in our classroom. We want our books to be appropriate for young children so we want to make sure that our books have lots of pictures.

Each team should locate 8 different pieces of print material from the library These print materials can be fiction and nonfiction. You may choose picture/ juvenile books, informational books, art/photography books, comic books, magazines etc..

Try to stretch your idea beyond “traditional materials”. If you have never done an advanced search on The Cat, have a go at it:

Go to the cat

o   Advance search

o   Material type

With your team, spend some time with the material that you located. As you look through the material, think about how mountain lions are represented in the material. Look closely at the pictures. Talk about what you see. Do you all notice the same things? What draws you to different materials? Are there some that you like more than others? Why?

Use your field notebooks to record important information. For example, you might want to keep a list of characteristics that are emerging from your explorations (these will be important for later projects),  you might want to sketch something, keep track of an important title or author (and note why you want to remember this author).

Now that you have spent some time with your material, choose 3 to bring back to class. Think about why you are choosing the 3 materials. Ask yourselves: what makes this a good resource to build understanding about lions? NOTE: These 3 materials should be appropriate for use in an early childhood classroom (a 300 page fictional novel is not an appropriate choice for an ECE classroom). These resources should, in some way, demonstrate different characteristics/aspects of “lions”.

Don’t forget to document (it will be helpful to have one of you work as the documenter).  As a documenter, you may want to think about some of the following questions:

·      What are your teammates curious about? What are they trying to figure out?

·      What knowledge are they drawing on?

·      How are your teammates building on each other’s ideas and perspectives?

Documenter’s notes should describe interactions between teammates. As much as possible, try to record a few direct quotes.

·      Did your teammates talk to each other?

·      What did they say?

·      How did you become part of the conversation?