A Common Core Standards Lesson Plan to Accompany 2015
Américas Award Winner Silver People: Voices from the Panama
Canal by Margarita Engle.

Grades: 6-8

Key topics: Oral storytelling; Panama Canal; Roosevelt; Power; Resistance; poetic prose; point of view; voice; historical fiction

Learning Goals:

Students will: 

• gain a more nuanced understanding of the people, hisotry and cultures surrounding the building of the Panama Canal
• consider the significance of perspective and bias in literature and historical accounts
• be able to recognize the distinct writing voices as they read mentor texts and hear oral accounts of stories
• recognize distinct elements of culture across various mentor texts
• strengthen their writer's voice through practice and implementation of sentence fluency in their writing
• be able to recognize hidden voices within stories and historical accounts

Lesson Plan

One hundred years ago, the world celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal, which connected the world’s two largest oceans and signaled America’s emergence as a global superpower. It was a miracle, this path of water where a mountain had stood—and creating a miracle is no easy thing. Thousands lost their lives, and those who survived worked under the harshest conditions for only a few silver coins a day.

From the young "silver people" whose back-breaking labor built the Canal to the denizens of the endangered rainforest itself, this is the story of one of the largest and most difficult engineering projects ever undertaken, as only Newbery Honor-winning author Margarita Engle could tell it.

2015 Américas Award Winner!

Grade Levels: 5-8, 9-12

Available through the Lending Library