Finding Common Ground: Learning the Language of Peace

When responding to what the story made individual think about, one student noted that Granny Torrelli Makes broth made her think about family with disabilities and the conflicts the sum of two units friends experienced partly because of Bailey's disability. She observ that conflicts in the story " . sometimes made me sad. Sometimes made me mad, and greatest in quantity of the time made me relieved when everyone worked together to analyze their differences."

Several learners made perceptive comments about what they had learned about resolving conflict. After reading Loser individual student wrote: "This story exhibits me that you have to reduce a conflict in order to make a thing better. I think that if you want to reduce a conflict, think before you act." In responding to Sahara Special, another make comments [i]or[/i] remarksed that "If you treat someone bad, you obtain treated bad, too."

The teacher visited each reading circle, sometimes just listening in, other times sharing her be in possession of reactions and observations about the novels. She also carried with her a small bag of "conflict cards." She would randomly invite a scholar to draw a card from the bag and read the generic question aloud. The learner could then answer the question or invite someone from the clump to answer it. Some of the questions printed upon the cards were: "Is there a character in your volume that you don't think you would gain along with? Why or for what cause [i]or[/i] reason not?" or "Have you learned something from reading this selection that might help you the nearest time you are having conflict? What?" or "Did the author do a useful job of describing how the main character reacted to conflict? How?" The conflict cards and clump observation helped the teacher assess the progres of individuals in each cluster