Teaching with Pat Mora: Pat Mora's Craft

Friday, April 3, 2015

Pat Mora's Craft

Mora's Work

Now that you have expanded your knowledge of Pat Mora as an author, touching upon her personal history and common themes, its time for a book list!

The majority of Mora's work is in the area of Children's Literature. Other books my Mora, however, include poetry and non-fiction adult literature.

For a detailed list of all of Mora's books, organized by audience age, check out this site:

Books!

Here are some of my favorites:

A Birthday Basket for Tia

(Realistic Fiction)

A story of a young girl's work to create a meaningful gift for her great-aunt.

Dona Flor: A Tall Tale about a Giant Woman with a Great Big Heart

(Folktale)

A tall tale story about a woman's strength and protection of her village.

The Desert is My Mother

(Realistic Fiction/Poetry)

Poetic imagery uses the desert as a metaphor for the relationship between both mother and child, and people and nature.

Agua, Agua, Agua

(Aesop Fable, Retold)

A board book for young readers to introduce this fable through repetition.

I Pledge Allegience

(Realistic Fiction)

A story about learning the Pledge of Allegience in school and for United States citizenship, this story makes connections between children and adults, relating their learning and experience.

I Pledge Allegiance by Pat Mora and Libby Martinez

These are just a few of Pat Mora's wonderful bilingual, multicultural texts.

Pat Mora's author website event outlines suggested activites for each one of her books. This is an INCREDIBLE resource and great way to jump right in to working with Pat Mora's text. Before choosing a text to use with students, check out these activities for inspiration:

Teaching Ideas Here!

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Personal Response Paper

A classroom library is an unlimited exploration ticket to a world of diverse people and culture. With thought and effort, this space in the classroom can become a getaway for students, as they read and discover the world around them. As a future teacher, is it vital that I begin to think about the development of my classroom library. Exploration through multicultural text is an important step in this thought process.

Multicultural text serves two major purposes. The first is to provide students with text within which they can make strong, personal connections. Reader’s look for characters, settings, and conflict within books that is similar to what they experience. Connecting with these characters is important for young readers to develop and understanding of relationships. Readers observe characters actions and dialogue, connecting it to their own experience. Multicultural text is a strong tool in creating these experiences, as the diverse characters and settings represented help connect with a wide range of students.

The second purpose of multicultural text is to provide students with an opportunity to explore cultures with which they are unfamiliar. Providing students with text from around the world turns the classroom library into a plane ticket. Students can read and experience the culture, characters, practices, and relationships of different groups of people from the comfort of their desk char. Reading diverse, multicultural text prepares students for future encounters with cultures other than their own. They develop and understanding, appreciation, and respect for the diversity of our world.

As I explored multicultural authors for my author study blog, I looked for these aspects of multicultural literature. I wanted to study an author who provided both experiences for readers. When I came across Pat Mora and her children’s books, I knew she would be a fabulous author to study.

One of the strongest elements of Pat Mora’s text is that the majority of her children’s books are bilingual. This text feature is a strong example of how multicultural text can help support students in making personal connections to literature. Perhaps there is a student who speaks Spanish at home and is looking for a book to read in both Spanish and English. My awareness of Pat Mora’s literature would help me to help this students, perhaps introducing them to the book “Gracias ~ Thanks”. This bilingual text would allow the reader to connect to familiar cultural elements, increasing both their interest and comprehension of the text.

Pat Mora’s text also provides a great opportunity for readers to discover cultures other than their own. Mora’s book entitled “The Desert is my Mother” is a great example of how readers can converge on a familiar topic told from the point of view of an alternate culture. This book uses metaphors of the desert to describe the importance of nature to our lives. Mora uses desert imagery to compare the desert to a mother figure, highlighting all it does for human kind. A young reader could open Mora’s book to learn about how landscape impact our approach to the world. This opportunity to talk about different metaphors would be a great conversation starter in comparing and contrasting different cultures.

In an effort to communicate these benefits of multicultural literature, specifically by Pat Mora, I created a blog for educators. I wrote this blog, entitled Teaching with Pat Mora, as a reference for other teachers to access if they were interested in using Pat Mora’s text as a teaching resource. The blog has two major parts. The first is a set of four blog posts that serve as a personal introduction to Pat Mora. The posts contain a list of favorite titles, biographical information, and common book themes and ideas. It is important for those interested in teaching with Pat Mora’s work to read this section. Learning about Pat Mora’s life and major themes helps develop a strong understanding of her work as an author rather than individual titles.

The second half of the blog is dedicated to the exploration through four different children’s books. Each blog post includes a short summary of the book and multiple ideas of application in the classroom. These activities range from short, read aloud discussion points to large, group analysis projects. The text and activities span a wide range of both age and skill lever, making the blog an effective tool for teachers of all grade levels. Links within these pages of the blog bring the visitor to other sources that provide an ever larger list of Pat Mora’s text and classroom activity connections.

Reading Pat Mora’s work has contributed to my interest in using multicultural children’s literature in my future classroom. My research has opened my eyes to the influences that help shape and create multicultural text. In the future, I hope that my blog, Teaching with Pat Mora, will help both myself and future teacher in their effort to respect and highlight multicultural text in the classroom.