Day 2 - 'Seven Blind Mice'

My second literacy lesson was very successful as we continued to learn about multiple perspectives. This time, we used the book called ‘Seven Blind Mice’ to help students understand that book characters also have different perspectives and see things differently. To help understand this concept better, I used the analogy, “Walking in someone else’s shoes”. We practiced taking off our shoes and visualizing what it would be like to be a mouse. We visualized how certain objects looked to us, what scared us, where we lived, etc. I really wanted to teach them how to walk in someone else’s shoes so that they could better understand why certain book characters see and feel about different things the way they do. ‘Seven Blind mice’ was fantastic because not only did it reveal seven different perspectives among book characters, but it taught my students that different perspectives will influence the way objects are seen and described. As I read the book aloud, I stopped after each mouse’s perspective was revealed. Students had the task of using a perspective chart to record the individual mouse’s perspective through either a drawing or by writing about it. The directions were not too specific, just that they write or draw about what each mouse saw as it was portrayed in the book. In the end, they had seven different recordings for each of the seven mice. This activity helped students to further think about each of the character’s perspective and compare it to other perspectives in the book.

Thinking about the lesson and based on their perspective charts, I had no evidence that any students struggled with the concept. However, I noticed that some students perhaps understood the concept more clearly than others. As I looked over their perspective charts, I noticed that some students drew their illustrations using a deeper knowledge of perspective. For example, in a drawing of the green mouse and how it perceived the object to be a snake, the student drew the mouse looking upward to the snake and the mouse was much smaller than the snake as well. Here, the student clearly understood perspective and that from the mouse’s perspective, indeed the snake should be much larger than the mouse and therefore, it should be looking upward if it would be looking at all. Many other students drew the mice smaller than the objects or even the same size of the objects. After seeing this, it was hard to know what they knew about the mice’s point of view. I asked myself many questions such as, “Do the students really know how to walk in a character’s shoes? How do students think these objects appeared in the eyes of the mouse? Did they think the mouse seen them as something much smaller, bigger or the same? So, although I knew that they understood the concept of perspective from yesterday and even tried to predict an author’s perspective, I was wondering if they learned how to see the perspective from a book character’s eyes. I wondered if they really could walk in the character’s shoes.

My objective for the task was for students to record the different perspectives or the things that the mice saw the object to be. It did not include for students to accurately portray the perspective itself. In other words, I didn’t expect for students to illustrate HOW the mice viewed the object or what it looked like FROM the mouse’s view. Although it was not required, I was happy to see that some students made some very accurate illustrations showing me that they were able to visualize and walk in the mouse’s shoes to help them see what the object looked like from the mouse’s perspective.

I think that for future lessons, I will instruct students to do this as well. This way, students aren’t merely just drawing pictures, but they are using critical thinking skills too. It will be important that I model this so that they know what is expected of their illustrations. And I will have to explain my thought processes to show them how I developed my picture. Furthermore, I will continue to give the students the option of writing or drawing but if they choose to write about the mice’s perspective, they will be required to not only tell me WHAT the mouse saw but, explain HOW the mice saw the objects. This is something I will have to model beforehand as well. Hopefully, the adjustment of this lesson plan will help future students practice walking in a character’s shoes as well as practice their critical thinking skills.