Using Multimodal Literacy Tools to Support Learners Who Need Challenging

 I implemented a digitally supported interdisciplinary virtual lesson with five students selected by a fourth grade teacher at Britton Elementary, and are students that needed to be challenged in literacy learning. These are my experiences and reflections after four lessons.   Lesson One We started by watching a read aloud on YouTube of Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco. In my original lesson plan, I planned to include Thunder Cake and Thank You, Mr. Falker (also by Patricia Polacco), but decided to omit the second book and later add Chicken Sunday. The lesson objectives were to talk about the story of Thunder Cake and discuss family stories and the definition of folklore. I explained that the students would be creating their own story on Story Jumper in response to the two books. T. Overall, they made more connections with the synopsis of the story than the illustrations, and noticed details in the text without noting anything about the drawings until I asked questions a...

  The multimodal activities I have thus far discussed in this blog have included the use of comics, video games, photography, and many other mediums of expression in order to strengthen students’ literacy skills (this post includes even more comics and adds literature circles to that as well). An understanding of multimodal literacy and its value of making literacy learning equitable is essential for modern teachers. Students who need to be challenged in reading and writing, whether they are gifted in this area or not, will benefit from inclusion of multimodal elements in praxis in the classroom. In one article I will review (Dallacqua, 2020), students used a comic entitled The Black Death (World History Ink, 2009) to study the plague. The author notes that “even though comics are positioned to engage readers, especially those often struggling, scholarship contends that they are valuable for a “wide range of subjects and benefit various student populations, from hesitant readers...