Workshop 1: December 3, 2010 (Andrea Pinkney)
Workshop 2: December 10, 2010 (Andrea Pinkney)
Workshop 3: December 15, 2010 (Brian Pinkney)
Workshop 4: December 22, 2010 (Brian Pinkney)
Grade 4
In winter of 2010, Behind the Book worked with fourth graders in a Collaborative Team Teaching class (meaning that about half of them are working one step above a special ed level) at CS 21. The students all received a copy of the New York Times bestseller,Sit In: How Four Friends Stood Up By Sitting Down, by Andrea Pinkney. The students had previously been studying the Civil Rights Movement in class and had watched two films on the subject. The students first wrote about which event during the Civil Rights Movement they would have wanted to participate in, and imagined what it would have been like to experience this event.
Sit In was a collaborative effort between Ms. Pinkney and her husband, acclaimed artist Brian Pinkney. Ms. Pinkney conducted the first two visits like a writing workshop, teaching the class her own methodsof writing. Ms. Pinkney described how she comes up with topic sentences, or “hooks,” that make the reader want to keep reading.Mr. Pinkney taught the students illustration
techniques on the final two visits. He first taught the students how to do a “wash” with
watercolors on paper, and later helped them to paint their characters on top of this background.
The program with the Pinkneys culminated in the students’ creation of a book that was divided into three chapters: Sit In, Boycott, and Freedom.
