Dear Martin: HS Library Stations and Book Review ~ Create@Hannon's Library Hub

High school library stations are really exciting because they almost always revolve around a book, theme, or genre. Even with the older students, I still like to color code my stations, and I normally number them, so they know exactly where to go and subsequently rotate. I also use the CREATE acronym because it helps me keep all of my activities straight.
For this set of stations, we based the activities on the novel, Dear Martin. Click on the picture below to get the full book review.

After the students have started reading the book in class (and before they finish it), we have them rotate stations to address major themes and concepts. This helps to keep them engaged in the story. This is what it looks like for high school students:

C - Computer/Construct
R - Reflect
E - Engineer
A - Art and Augment
T - Think
E - Express

**The link to all of these station materials is at the end of the blog article! (FREEBIE!)

COMPUTER STATION: Construct

For our first station, we construct a meme, which has been really fun for students. Students can create a meme about diversity, social justice, a character, or an incident in the book. Our students really took off with this concept and created quite a few insightful memes.

Here are a couple of student examples:

Reflect

OPTION 1: Students create a Bio poem that allows them to think of all the different sides of their character. This is easy to do when you read a book written by Nic Stone who does an amazing job of developing her characters. The bio poem has students thinking about the character's fears, dreams, and personality traits. It is a great way for students to process the most important qualities of the characters in the novel.

OPTION 2: Justyce expresses all of his feelings through his letters to Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior. These letters allow him to process his experiences and the injustices that are leaving him feeling upset and angry. Students use the friendly letter format to write to any character in the story.

Engineer

Students are never too old to use Lego bricks to explore themes and engineer designs. In this station, students put together a lego structure that reflected a theme from Dear Martin. Because this was the first time we did this activity with these students, we provided them with several themes. They were challenged to choose the theme, build a structure and then explain how the structure and the theme relate to the story. The students created several amazing thematic structures.

Art

Our Quivervision art station involves students coloring a shoe for a character from Dear Martin. The shoe they create should represent an idea, theme, or important message.

To get the full lesson plan and how to use the Quivervision app, check out my activity plan on the website with this link: Dear Martin: Characterization and Social Justice

Thinking Lab

The Cult of Pedagogy gives an excellent overview of hexagonal thinking and how it can be utilized in the classroom. For our students, we provide the hexagons with the names of characters, themes, symbols, and important quotes. Their job is to create the connections, discuss them, and then write about their connections to conclude the activity. I love this activity because we have had some amazing conversations about books!

Here are some hexagons that my co-librarian created for this novel:

Express (Music):

High school students love music. This is a great activity that gets them thinking about the characters in their book and the song lyrics they listen to. We ask students to choose a character from the novel and create a playlist they think the character would listen to; this playlist should reflect the character's personality. The best part of this station? They are able to access their phone and their music for this activity. Once they create a playlist, they can dive deeper and choose a favorite song, write down the lyrics, and explain why they chose that song for their character.