Point of View and Perspective

One of my favorite lessons this year has to have been Point of View/Perspective. After studying the CCSS and debating with myself how to approach point of view vs. perspective, or point of view AND perspective, or just perspective I finally won and decided to teach BOTH.

I began by building off of prior knowledge of point of view. This took two lessons. We reviewed/discussed first person and third person. (I'm so awesome that I forgot to bring home my Reading Journal to show you pictures of the notes we took, but hopefully will post some soon). We did mention second person, but didn't go in to too much detail.

When teaching the definitions I used picture books to help, we discuss how does that point of view influence the description of events in the stories. Here are a few books that can be used to introduce point of view (remember this is NOT perspective).

First Person:

How Many Days to America by Eve Bunting

Saturdays and Teacakes by Lester Laminack

Third Person:

The Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles

Two Bad Ants by Chris Van Allsburg

I also broke the students up in to small groups, gave them poster board, and short stories. They had to determine what the point of view of the story was, and how they knew it...giving key words, and using the text to support their answers.

I used this packet from Nicole Shelby from TpT

The next step was to discuss/define perspective, and then put it ALL together in a few lessons using non fiction text. 

Here is my topic poster (anchor chart) I used in my classroom. 

I choose one topic for our nonfiction texts (written in different points of view, and from different perspectives), so that we could compare and contrast them all at the end. The topic I used was D-Day. The kids were SO in to it.

Huber Mark Alvater (1st person, fighter pilot) 

George Kerchner (3rd person, led D-Day maneuver...actually stormed the beaches)

Finally we read a simple nonfiction book from our library about D-Day (3rd person)

After reading each article/book, we took notes about them in our journals. Writing down important information, interesting details, and our thinking. After reading and discussing each article/book, I gave each student this compare/contrast worksheet, and had them fill it out for a grade.

I would say that is all, but the students were so in to the topic and different perspectives they asked to make Animoto videos and interactive posters using a site called tackk.com. I am still learning about tackk and not 100% sure I really like it (more because of the privacy side of it all), but the kids do!

Finally I MUST brag on one of my students! Check her out on the local news!!!