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Resources: Materials

Light Up the Sky: A Teacher Guide to Accompany the HBJ Treasury of Literature series

The Products
Click on the following links to view .pdf versions of the materials developed through the Light Up the Sky Project. The materials will appear in a separate window.

The Process
Six stories from the fifth grade basal reader, Light Up the Sky (Farr & Strickland, 1993), were used in the program. Two stories ("The Speech" and "Teacher for the Day") served as pretest units. Two stories ("New Home in Ohio", "The Great Caravan on the National Road") were used in the intervention. Yet another two stories ("Like Jake and Me" and "Many Moons") served as posttest units. For all six stories, the following materials were developed: (1) homework assignments (from which students were given a choice of one assignment from a list, including analytical, creative, and practical assignments); (2) vocabulary assessment (18 items: 6 analytical, 6 creative, and 6 practical); and (3) comprehension assessment (18 items: 6 analytical, 6 creative, and 6 practical). Teacher’ guides were developed for the four intervention stories based on the Triarchic instruction and assessment paradigm. These guides showed teachers how to teach traditional language-arts skills (vocabulary, spelling, reading comprehension, and writing) so as to call into play and develop students’ analytical, creative, and practical abilities and achievement.

The instructional materials were designed to help students develop analytical, creative, and practical thinking skills that the students could apply directly to the improvement of their proficiency in reading subject matter. Consider some examples of each kind of material, as manifested in in-class and homework assignments. The materials were designed for the actual textbook the children were using, Light Up the Sky (Farr & Strickland, 1993). Although activities are classified loosely as analytical, creative, and practical, these classifications represent emphases rather than fully discrete categories. Ultimately, we want children to learn to combine these skills rather than merely to use them separately.