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**Contributors:** Elisha Ann Catie Brownback Cherilyn Carkhuff Kara Fischer Katie Robinson Ashley Prather Lee Webb


 * Book summary and analysis:** In this book, Vivian Vasquez talks about a year she spent teaching Junior Kindergarten in Canada (the equivalent of Pre-K). Although these students were too young to decode text, they embarked on a rich critical literacy curriculum throughout the year that consisted of critiquing the world around them, analyzing why things happened the way they did, and then taking social action to address injustices. The objects of their analysis were derived both from events that went on during the year, and from texts students encountered. Though their inquires were guided and supported by Vasquez, they were all initiated by student discussion. She did not plan the curriculum ahead of time, but let it develop organically. Each new step was tracked on the class's audit trail (or learning wall), where visual reminders of the learning throughout the year were posted with arrows showing the connections between their different projects. Example projects included: learning about vegetarians and making sure they were taken into consideration at school functions, petitioning to be included in the school's French Café (an event only open to upper level students), and rewriting //Baby Beluga// to include details about the beluga whale's endangerment and then raising money for the World Wildlife Fund. These students, who many would think too young for critical literacy, did deep and meaningful literacy work during their year in Vasquez's class.

In our own classrooms, we can strive to adopt her principles of letting student interests lead to curriculum, teaching students to examine the social inequities behind the issues that interest them, and encouraging students to take social action as part of their critical literacy work. We can also adopt the idea of an audit trail, to make student learning visible to both our students and those outside our classroom, and to show the connections between what the class is learning across the year.