Needs, Wants, and Gratitude

This packet is designed to help students explore the concepts of needs vs. wants and the value of gratitude through two stories on grandmothers and their grandsons. In Last Stop on Market Street, a grandmother teaches her grandson to find beauty in the people and places in his environment and to feel gratitude for what he has rather than longing for what he hasn’t. In Those Shoes a boy struggles with the dilemma of needs vs. wants when he wants the latest fashion footwear. He ultimately experiences gratitude for his boots and happiness when he is generous to a friend whose needs are greater than his. Although culturally generic in many respects, both books will enable children living in urban and culturally diverse settings to connect to the characters and environment and will open windows in understanding for readers who live in suburban or rural settings.

Click on the View File button below to download the Social Justice Packet No. 20.

Instructions for Using the Packets

Each Activity Packet addresses an aspect of the “Big Idea” that the collection addresses, (e.g. the Universal themes of Traditional Literature, Social Justice, or Interconnectness, etc.) It starts with a focus concept, such as “Needs, Wants, and Gratitude”, or “Helping Others”, followed by an overview explanation of the topic and an explanation of the target learners.

The next section, in the box, titled “What developmental Reading Behaviors Are Emphasized?” comes from our book, Reading Development: A Handbook of Assessment and Instruction in which we lay out a birth-to-maturity continuum of reading behaviors that research and experience have shown us learners go through as they grow as readers. In this section we name the Engagement, Comprehension, and Language-to-Print behaviors the Activity Packet will address. If the teacher is looking for additional activities to support one of these behaviors, they can easily be found in the Handbook.

Following this are the books and materials needed to carry out the activities.

Next come two or more activities that support the exploration of the content of the reading material such that the learners gain a further understanding of an aspect of the “Big Idea” as well as learning about literary features such as character development, plot, foreshadowing, etc., and specific aspects of how print works to represent language, such as phonological awareness, spelling conventions, grammatical features, etc.

Next we offer a sampling of the Common Core Standards the Activity Packet addresses for those who wish to assure that they are meeting government recommended learning goals.

If other standards are relevant, we will include them. For instance, to Social Justice packets, we add  Social Justice Standards, taken from www.learningforjustice.org.

Currently Packet Samples are from the following books:

Phinney, M.Y. & Ward, G.C. (2020). Traditional Tales: 30 Activities for Differentiated Instruction. Seattle, WA: Amazon.

Phinney, M.Y. & Ward, G.C. (2021). Interconnectedness: Connecting to Self, Others, Nature and Society. Seattle, WA: Amazon.

Ward, G.C. & Phinney, M.Y. (2023). 36 Sets of Classroom Activities Using Social Justice Literature for Differentiated Instruction. Seattle, WA: Amazon.