The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind - Reading With Our Community

Our community is reading The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer as a One Book, One Community read. I was especially excited this year because the different formats enable my elementary school students to participate this year.


We had been challenging ourselves to "Read Without Walls" so I introduced this book as a true story about someone who "thought without walls" and challenged himself to solve problems in his community.  We began by identifying different kinds of "communities" we might belong to:


Ultimately we defined community as "A group of people that all participate, work together, do the same thing, and believe the same thing."

We read the book together, pausing periodically to listen for the challenges in William's community. Challenges we identified included:
  • No lights
  • No rain
  • No water
  • No food
  • No money
  • No school

With a working knowledge of what a "community" is and some identifiable challenges in William's community, we were then ready to identify challenges in our own community. Our thoughts and concerns in my next post...



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