I really went for two different approaches when looking at the cultural relevance of books for my students. The first book I looked at was, Bats at the Beach, by, Brian Lies. I read this book and looked for places the students might need support.
1. Location - This book takes place on a beach. A lot of my little land lubbers have never seen or experienced the ocean. I would have to take the time to help them visualize and maybe find some photos or video of the beach.
2. Campfires - I would ask my students first, but based on former students I am guessing many of them have not had much experience camping. This book talks about sitting around the campfire and making smores, singing songs, and telling stories. Again, we would need to have a discussion about how these things look and try to make connections.
3. Vocabulary - I would need to preteach and provide non-verbal support for words like trowels, banjos, foamy, surfing, sea spray.
4. Experience with this type of text - The text may have formatting and features that are unfamiliar. The book is in rhyme, so the sentence structure is not traditional. Again, we would discuss and look for examples during reading.
The second book I looked at is a historical fiction book called, Baseball Saved Us by, Ken Mochizuki. I love this book, but it is a book that takes a lot of background support and build up to even approach. However, the theme is important enough to consider it. For this book I found a great online resource that asks a series of questions about a book's cultural relevance: (WETA 2010)
Question #1: Are the characters in the story like you and your family?
Question #2: Have you ever had an experience like one described in this story?
Question #3: Have you lived in or visited places like those in the story?
Question #4: Could this story take place this year?
Question #5: How close do you think the main characters are to you in age?
Question #6: Are there main characters in the story who are boys (for boys) or girls (for girls)?
Question #7: Do the characters talk like you and your family do?
Question #8: How often do you read stories like these?
For this book many of the questions would be no. For example question two. Not many of our students have lived in a camp. Some of them have, but it isn't a common experience. We would need to have a class discussion on that that would be like and look for clues in the story for how the character feels here.
Question three is similar and would require similar support.
Question four was interesting to me. For any of our students historical events need scaffolded support. The students would not necessarily know anything about World War II and the Japanese internment camps. A need for a history lesson or a non-fiction companion book would be necessary.
Finally, there is question 8. I do think my students read a lot of realistic fiction, so the formatting of that could be reviewed to help them. However, at least in my group, we haven't read a lot of historical fiction, so we would need to consider that genre and build a timeline or some kind of schema.
On the other hand, there are some familiarities with family, the main character is comparable to their age and we could work through a lot of connections and empathy through those elements.
Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Date of publication). Title of document. Retrieved from http://Web address
WETA. (2010). Culturally relevant books in the ELL classroom. Retrieved from
http://www.ldonline.org/article/40003/
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