1) Home in my Own Country; Guided Writing by Nancy Coffey, Operation Bootstrap

In order to encourage students' English-based thought processes, we started the class with guided imagery. I lowered the lights while students put their heads down and closed their eyes in order to visualize their childhood homes. Following the guided imagery exercise, I conducted a guided writing activity.
 
 

2) Writing Prompt by Ashley Dumas, Project Hope

To help students begin writing about the topic of home, I adapted an exercise that was created by Cathy Anderson, the coordinator of the 1998 Homebuying Readiness Project at the Adult Literacy Resource Institute. For this exercise, students brainstormed compound nouns that included the words "home" or "house." My students and I came up with lists and lists of words. When we couldn't think of any more words, I had them look in dictionaries for even more words. Then, I asked students to pick one word from our list and to write and essay using that word as the topic. Students picked very different words-- from "homeland" to "homeboy" to "homework"- for their essay topics.

After each reading, I had the students write an essay on a related topic. The first reading was "Life in a Somali Aquaal" by Lucie Germer. Germer described the nomadic lifestyle of people in Somalia who carry their tent-like homes with them. I had the students write about whether or not they would enjoy being a nomad. The second reading was "Solitary Confinement" by Peggy Lang. Lang’s piece is a powerful poem about an innocent woman who is locked in solitary confinement for months. I had the students write about how long they could stand living under those conditions. The third reading was "Stranger at the Table" by Bob Greene. Greene writes about a man who returns to his house after a vacation, only to find out that a homeless man has taken up residence there while he was gone. I had students write about whether or not they agreed with how the main character handled the situation.
 
 

4) More Writing About Home by Ashley Dumas, Project Hope

First, I asked the students to brainstorm what places are in a neighborhood. I started the list with a few of my own ideas (grocery stores, parks, and churches), and had them finish the list with their own ideas. When we compared ideas, the students were surprised to hear how similar their lists were. I was touched that many students included homeless shelters or Project Hope on their lists. Next, I had them write a paragraph about a neighborhood where they have lived, or about the neighborhood that they currently live in.

For the final activity of the lesson, we read the story, "Ordinary People" by Jonathan Kozol in his book about homelessness, Rachel and Her Children. As a follow up writing activity, the students wrote about people they know who have lost their homes or fallen to hard times, but who are currently living better.

The discussion about the experience of leaving one's country to come to the United States generated strong and conflicting feelings in my classroom. We discussed which country people consider "home" and if that changes over time. Are people here purely by choice, or by economic and other necessity?

To create a bit of a historical perspective about the topic of leaving one's homeland, we explored two children's books about people who fled to the U.S. because of war and repression in their native land. In the Lotus Seed (written by Sherry Garland and illustrated by Tatsuro Kiuchi. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. New York. 1993), a woman flees Vietnam and brings a lotus seed to remember her home. In How Many Days to America? (written by Eve Bunting and illustrated by Beth Peck. Houghton Mifflin. New York. 1988), a family flees an unnamed country, bringing with them only a song of hope. After reading these stories out loud, I asked students to imagine that they had to flee from their homes with just a few minutes warning. "What would you take with you," I asked. I wrote the items on the blackboard as they called them out. Their items included photo albums, food, money, credit cards, identification documents, clothes, medicine, water, blankets, pillow and pets. Then we went down the list by two's, choosing only one item. For instance, when asked to choose between photo albums and food, the students choose food. Then they were asked if they would choose food or money, and once again, food was chosen. In the end, with just one choice left, the class chose water. Earlier, I had done this activity with a group of high school students who had a somewhat different list, but the process of elimination resulted with the same final choice- water. Following this lesson, we returned to the more personal discussion about living here and missing "home."
 
 

6) Facilitating Essay Writing by Deborah Marquardt, W.A.I.T.T. House

The External Degree Program's (EDP's) Community Awareness task requires students to attend a live performance and to visit a museum. Those experiences must then be described in separate critique essays. These can be difficult assignments for students, who often don't "absorb" the performance or museum fully enough to describe the experiences in adequate detail. Preliminary descriptive writing in the Career Awareness/ Life skills class provides an opportunity to work with the rhetorical pattern of critiquing art and literature before facing these challenging EDP essays.

With that in mind, I searched for a short descriptive piece that captured the essence of home. The piece I found is in a book called Home: A Collaboration of Thirty Distinguished Authors and Illustrators of Children's Books to Aid the Homeless (edited by Michael J. Rosen. Harper Collins. New York. 1992).

I chose the piece called "The Lightwell" by Laurence Yep. Accompanying the writing there is a lovely illustration by Sheila Hamanaka, so I arranged to have the illustration computer-scanned by W.A.I.T.T. House's technology specialist, Anthony Centeio. This enabled me to distribute copies of the text and the illustration as they appeared in the book, enhancing the connection between the words and the visual detail they convey.

I gave the students time to read the piece silently and then I asked them how Mr. Yep was able to capture a time and place so vividly. They first mentioned visual images, all the references to light for instance. Then they caught on to the role that the other senses played in their "reading" of the work, especially the sense of sound. We listed the senses on the board, and students eagerly volunteered phrases from the piece which fit each sense. This lead to a discussion about how without an explained reference to the sense of touch, the more immediate feeling of touch is experienced by the reader through the sound of the word "slap" when wet laundry is being hung in the passage.

After the discussion, students were given a writing assignment: Describe a place that feels like "home" to you.

I was very pleased with the results, especially given how early in the cycle it still was. Later in the cycle, I gave the writings back to the students for revision.
 
 

7) Prioritizing Topics to Write About by Stephen Hanley, W.A.I.T.T. House

We returned to the FannieMae Foundation curriculum so as to extract homebuying topics of interest for further study. As a class we decided to prioritize four topics:

Finding Your Dream Home

Deciding What Kind of House You Want

Types of Ownership

How to Read Classified Ads

Students reviewed their notes and vocabulary lists and then tried to write sentences about what they thought was most the useful information and of most importance to them about the process of buying and maintaining a home. After they wrote their sentences, I reviewed them so as to make corrections and offer suggestions. After this preliminary writing activity, students put their ideas in numerical order according to their internal sense of logic drafting an outline of sorts. Students then reexamined their sentences and began to write a short essay about owning a home.

To complete the unit students shared the second draft of their essays about homebuying. Each student read his or her essay to the entire class. After the readings, there was a discussion about all that the essays had touched upon and what students had learned about homebuying and English language usage (i.e. new vocabulary, comprehension tricks, writing skills, etc.)

Students articulated how they benefited from working with the Homebuying Readiness Curriculum. Since finding housing is a basic need that all the students have experience with, students were able to draw on their own perceptions and real-life expertise while they simultaneously integrated new grammar and language usage skills including writing practice. Of equal importance, students stated that they believe they received some of the keys to unlock the mystery of buying a home in the Boston area.
 
 

8) Whole Language Exercises by Lisa Garrone, ABCD's South Side Head Start

Excerpts from students’ journals provided material for grammar instruction. I chose writing that illustrated a specific grammatical point that the class was studying. For example, the following is a sample from a student’s journal that I copied on the board and asked the class how they would change it:

"I liked my neighborhood. She drinks coffee with me every morning."

I used this excerpt to reinforce our work on the simple present and past and also to emphasize the difference between neighbor and neighborhood. The majority of my students confused these two words often. To prevent any one from feeling picked on, all writing samples were shared anonymously and I included excerpts from most of the students’ journals. I tried to include examples of proper grammar usage as well.

I also combined journal excerpts and organized them to reflect back to students what they consider important when evaluating a neighborhood in which to reside. We used this compilation of journal writings as reading material (permission was granted from the class to include the following corrected excerpts):

Things Students Like in Neighborhoods

Nature:

"There are quiet beaches. There are lots of flowers. It is a beautiful country."

"In my neighborhood, there are a lot of trees."

"We liked living there because there was a forest with pine trees close by."

"The air was clean."

"My yard is very big. It has many flowers and grapes."

"My house was in the middle of the yard full of trees."

"Every morning we get sunshine through the window on the balcony."
 
 

Good Neighbors

"All our neighbors were very good people."

"It was nice and people were friendly."

"The people in my neighborhood are very friendly. We joke together.

The people on the right are Tewelde and his wife, Mighoti. The people on the left, Mr. Gebregiorgis and his wife, Migistim are very gentle people. . . On Sundays,holidays, and days off from work, all the neighbors eat together in my yard."

"We have good neighbors and a lot of cousins."

"When I lived in Caracas, Venezuela, I had some very good neighbors. My son was 3 years old. I took him to day care and my neighbors picked him up at 4:00 because I got out of work at 6:00. While I was out, they took care of my apartment and, if there was trouble, they called me at work. I miss them very much. Now that I’m in Boston, I always remember them because they treated me so well."

"I liked my neighbor. She drank coffee with me every morning. After we drank coffee, we went shopping all day. Sometimes we went to the beach and tanned. Sometimes we went to exercise in the gym."
 
 

Quiet

"I like my neighborhood because it is nice and quiet. . . I like it because I live on a dead end street where there is no traffic and no disturbance."
 
 

Convenient

"My neighborhood had a market, shops, library, cinema, theater, school, and park."
 
 

Parking

"My dream house has a driveway so I can park my car."
 
 

Things Students Don’t Like in Neighborhoods
 
 

Noisy

"My neighborhood was near the airport. . . There was only one problem. When a plane flew over our neighborhood, it made a lot of noise."
 
 

No Parking

"My problem is that I can’t park my car easily because I don’t have a parking space."
 
 

Far From Transportation

"We did not like it because our home was far from the bus station. . . Most of the streets where we walked were not paved."

"I don’t like that my house is so far because, when I have to take the bus, I walk a little too much. That is very hard for me. Most times, when I have to catch my bus and no one can drive me, it is a problem because I live far from the Main Street."

Compiling and organizing students’ writing in this way and then using it as reading material in class impacted students positively in two ways. In addition to building students’ confidence in their ability to write, it seemed to affirm their beliefs concerning factors to consider when choosing a neighborhood in which to live.

At this point we turned to the neighborhood in which our school is located. I asked students to list some places where they go in the neighborhood. A student volunteered to write the places on the board as the class told him. This list was generated:

school library Head Start

health clinic Village Market Dollar Store

beauty salon bank post office

pharmacy pizza restaurant bakery

9) EXERCISES THAT EXPLORE HOME by Marie Hassett, ABCD's LearningWorks

The following self-designed lessons- What is a Home?, A Poet's View of America as Home, What Makes a Home Right?, The House On Mango Street, and What Does a Home Cost- comprise the backbone of what we did in class. In that way, I chose to use the unit in the FannieMae Foundation curriculum as a conceptual jumping-off point.

LESSON ONE: WHAT IS A HOME?

Vocabulary:

• Continent
• Country
• State/Province
• City, Town, Village
• Urban, Suburban, Rural

• Robert Frost, excerpt from "Death of Hired Man"

• Natalie Goldberg, "Home"

• Scott Russell Sanders

• What does it mean to "feel at home"?
• What kinds of people, places, and/or things make us "feel at home"?
• What makes the place where you live a home?
• What do you think of when you think of your home?

Describe the place that has been most homelike to you.

LESSON TWO: A POET'S VIEW OF AMERICA AS HOME

Vocabulary:

• Chicano
• Picasso
• masterpiece
• marginalize
• stereotype

Abelardo Delgado, "Stupid America."

Questions:

• Why does the poet call America "stupid"?
• What is causing the problems that that the people in these poems are having?
• What kinds of things keep immigrants from "feeling at home" in America?

Describe a stereotype that affects your life.

LESSON THREE: WHAT MAKES A HOME RIGHT?

Vocabulary:

• adaptation
• evolution

Contemporary Reader. Volume 1, #5, pp. 54-63.

Questions:

• How do humans differ from animals in their choice of homes?
• What does "survival of the fittest" mean?
• What physical features help camels adapt to their lives in the desert?
• How do humans adapt to their surroundings

Reading:

Sandra Cisneros, "The House on Mango Street"

Questions:

• Who is telling the story?
• How many places does the storyteller remember living in?
• Describe the house on Mango Street.
• Describe the house that the family wished for.
• How did the nun make the narrator feel about her home on Loomis?
• Why doesn't the narrator think the house on Mango Street is a "real house"?
• On a separate piece of paper, describe the house that you want to live in.

Describe the house that you want to live in.

LESSON FIVE: WHAT DOES A HOME COST?

Reading:

Stephanie Ebbert. "Advocates running out of options to shelter homeless." Boston Globe, April 6, 1999.

Questions:

• Why do you think more families need shelter now?
• What are some of the problems people face when they are trying to find and keep housing for their families?

Figure out what kinds of jobs people can get and how much those jobs will pay if the applicant has a GED/high school diploma or less. Now, figure out a budget for:

• A two parent, one child family
• A single parent, one child family

10) When is Home Really A Home? by Eunice Allman, Quincy College

We read a short composition entitled "Sometimes Home Is Not really Home" written by Maggie Mok, a student at Hunter College of the City University of New York. It can be found in the text book, Changes, Readings for Writers.

After students read the passage to themselves, I read it aloud to reinforce the proper pronunciation and to give them a chance to absorb the meaning of any new words. There was a few seconds of silence when I was done and then Ha exclaimed, "I can't believe this. This is exactly what happened to my mother when she went to Vietnam where she was born and brought up. I am going to show this to her. She thought this situation only happened to her." We then spoke about the notion of home- what is home and under what circumstances do you feel like you're at home? This led to a further discussion about using the term' home" as a metaphor. To give an example of the use of home as metaphor, I handed out a copy of the song "The House I Live In" composed by Earl Robinson and made famous by Frank Sinatra in 1945.

After reading the lyrics of the song to them, I asked them what they thought the reference to "the house" represented. They responded that the metaphor of the house was expanded to refer to the immigrants experience of living in a new county- the U.S. Then I actually sang the song to them and had them sing it with me a second and third time. We were sitting in a small circle so that we could see and hear each other. They were clearly enjoying the singing, so I asked each student if he or she wanted to share a song from the country that expressed some notion of home. Of the eight students present that day, six sang songs in their mother tongue and then using English each student explained his or her song to us. It was a wonderful learning activity and was completely spontaneous!

For homework, I asked students to write a 4-5 paragraph essay about how they defined "home."
 
 

11) Essay Writing About Home by Veronica Gouvea, Roxbury Community College

We continued with a general discussion of the idea of being a home owner as opposed to being a tenant. Students wrote outlines listing the advantages and disadvantages of being homeowners. Later they wrote compare and contrast compositions based on their outlines.

For more information about writing complete paragraphs and short essays on the topic of home, see "The Home I Knew As A Child."