Island of the Blue Dolphins

November 18, 2011

Room 12 is currently reading Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins. If you are unfamiliar with the book, it is based on the true story of the "Lost Woman of San Nicolas." The Lost Woman lived on alone on San Nicolas Island, just off the coast of Santa Barbara, from 1835 to 1853. She was one of many American Indians who inhabited the island long before the Christian era. The Lost woman was found 18 years after the rest of her tribe moved off the island. She was brought to the Santa Barabara Mission, where she died only 7 weeks later.

While following the main character's story of survival, Room 12 students will be learning and practicing essential comprehension skills. So far, we are "growing our ideas about characters" by:

making a movie in our mind, drawing on the text to envision and become the character.
using our own experiences to help us walk in the character's shoes, inferring what the character is thinking, feeling, and experiencing.
revising our mental movie as we get new details from the text.
predicting what will happen next by making a mental movie, and telling it bit by bit.
thinking about what has alreading happened, then use what we know about the characters to imagine what they will do and how they will do it.
drawing upon our personal knowledge of similar experiences to make connections, predictions, and have empathy for the characters.

Island of the Blue Dolphins is not only a great book for practicing our reading strategies, but will also give us insight into the lives of California Indians and the local wildlife. We will learn how the Chumash lived their day to day lives and how they used natural resources. We will also learn about the many fascinating land and sea creatures that appear in the story. We will use this website in the computer lab to further develop our understanding of these topics. Feel free to check it out, but be careful not to jump to far ahead and spoil the ending!