Option #5: Choose Your Own Text

I translated into BookBuilder a children's book that I wrote during my undergraduate senior year for a class called "Anthropology as  Public Engagement". The book is called "A Deep-Ocean Ordeal: Whales Like Different Meals!," and its purpose is to get kids thinking about how their social landscapes affect the ways in which they perceive and interact with others.

In summary of the book, a group of orcas holds a party and serves a banquet of fish. The blue whales at the party become offended because they don't eat fish. With the help of a sea turtle, the blues realize that they were being culturally insensitive, since the orcas had no way of knowing they didn't eat fish and were trying to be gracious hosts. The blues use an anthropological lens to realize that the differences in the species' cultural backgrounds caused the mix-up, which allows them to retain their friendship with the orcas. 

The goal of the book is to help kids recognize the role of culture in shaping their relationships. Ideally, they will use this as a lens for understanding why people might act in ways that seem strange to them and that this should not necessarily alienate them from each other. 

In considering the composition of this book, I tried to employ principles of Universal Design for Learning such that a wide audience is able to access this text. I used large text (this can accomodate low-vision readers and also students who are newer to reading and like to be able to see individual words clearly) and every person has the option of using the voice-reader to access the text. This could be helpful to a student with dyslexia or anyone who enjoys or needs to be read to for some reason. Students on the younger end of the suggested-age spectrum might benefit from having this book read to them because they might recognize more of the words if they were spoken to them than if they encountered them in text. 

I used the coaches in a few different ways-- for one, they help explain some of the plot elements of the book, such as the rhyme scheme. This allows students to not just learn what is happening in the story but how the book was written. I also employed the coaches to ask questions, the goal of which is to keep kids engaged, thinking critically, and exploring the ways in which some of the ideas in this book relate to their own lives. 

Users can click on some of the more difficult words (which are underlined) to access the definition. I am also hoping that the colorful, bold pictures are helpful in representing the text; this could be useful to students who best process information visually but aren't proficient readers.