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MBS Direct is proud to partner with Questia to offer your faculty and
students access to an interactive library that delivers content and tools
like no other. Questia School allows teachers and students to interact
with digital resources, sharing notes and communicating within the same
book. Faculty can deliver personalized service to best meet the needs of
students using content-rich lesson plans and assessment tools.
and communicating
Questia High School provides 24/7 access to the world’s largest online
knowledge.
collection of full-text books, as well as journal, magazine and newspaper
articles in the humanities and social sciences. To complement this vast
library, Questia offers a wide-range of tools for students and faculty.
Open a New Era of Literacy and Learning for Your Students
From simple on-screen highlighting and note-taking to instant citations,
Questia School helps students build research skills and content knowledge
simultaneously. In addition, students can:

Study when and where they want with 24/7 access to Questia

Plan, organize, and create successful research and classroom projects 
Find information quickly and spend less time searching the web

Automatically create properly formatted footnotes and bibliographies
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Easily search materials, as every page is digitized
student
Solutions
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Designed to Improve the Level of Instruction and
Student Achievement
Literary Terms — Teaching Characterization
Questia School’s award-winning, standards-aligned lesson plans have
Lesson Summary
QuickView
Topic: Language Arts — Literary Terms
Grade Levels: 9–12
Lexile Range: 1260–1300
Focus Question: How does an author
convey a character’s physicality,
personality, life history, and values?
Curriculum Objectives: Language
Arts students will understand how
an author conveys a character’s
physicality, personality, life history,
and values.
Toni Cade Bambara has been called “a major contributor
to the emerging genre of black women’s literature,” along
with Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. In “Blues Ain’t No
Mockingbird,” Bambara sets into motion the “power of
the word” to speak out against racial stereotyping and to
emphasize the value of self-identity, personal pride, and
family unity. Bambara’s story centers on a relatively minor
racial clash that provides insight into the larger problem of
whites stereotyping blacks and the white power structure.
With subtleness and intricacy, she weaves characters using
precise dialect, body language, action, and even nonverbal
sounds that speak volumes about her characters’ self-image,
motivations, and personalities.
been developed to provide educators with a reliable teaching resource
that links a remarkable collection of carefully selected books to classroom
Name:
Key Terms
Toni Cade Bambara, Black Power
Movement, body language, dialect,
griot, stereotype
Teaching Tip
activity and practice.
Date:
Before beginning this activity, students should be familiar
with the philosophies of self-definition that received great
attention during the Black Power Movement between 1965
Assessment
and 1975.
“Blues Ain’t No Mockingbird”
Quick Check
Students will identify information
about literary characters on a Graphic
DIRECTIONS: Using information from the articles you researched in the Questia library,
Organizer.
complete the following graphic organizer.
OR
Extended Learning Opportunity
Amount and
Students will brainstorm an author’s
What Granny
GRANDDADDY CAIN
style of speech
calls him
notes to “design” a character.
Quick Check
Faculty will have access to educational tools including:

350+ educator-developed lesson plans
Approximate Time Frame
Body language
Quick Check
1 (50-minute) class period
Extended Learning Opportunity
1 hour, plus homework
Toni Cade Bambara, Ralph Faulkingham, John Wideman, Earl
Lovelace Photo credit by: Gigi Kaeser
http://www.questiaschool.com/read/796693
His hands
An important action
Describe his character in your own words

14,000 + books with associated Lexile levels

Resources hand-selected by educators, researchers, and UNIT 6 Lesson 1
librarians to align with key state and federal curriculum standards
Facial
expression
Copyright 2007 Questia Media, Inc. Use of this material by any
other individual or organization is prohibited.
GRANNY
Actions that convey
her family role
Nonverbal sounds
and their meaning
Describe her character in your own words

Embedded assessment tools to monitor and evaluate student progress

Plagiarism search tools to help faculty promote student accountability
How does Bambara’s inclusion of details about her characters’ personal histories,
personalities, and physical characteristics contribute to the reader’s interpretation of
the characters?
Best of all, you can provide the best online educational resources without
UNIT 6 Lesson 1
Quick Check Student Handout
Copyright 2007 Questia Media, Inc. Use of this material by any other individual or organization is prohibited.
Questia lesson plans and
embedded assignments save prep
time and result in more contentfocused teaching and learning.
tying up current school funds. Instead, the cost of Questia can be deducted
from your MBS Direct commission check.
Questia Add-On Services
As a partner school of MBS Direct, you have access to a full line of Questia
products, including the exclusive add-on collections below.
Questia Achieve
Questia Professional Collection
A carefully focused 10,000+
A unique collection of 3,500+
volume collection created
digital books, along with research
specifically to support advanced
For questions about discount
pricing on Questia for MBS
academic programs including AP
and IB courses in social studies
®
tools, that offer a portfolio
®
of professional development
resources for faculty.
and language arts.
Direct partner schools,
contact MBS Direct at
Questia@mbsDirect.net.
To learn more about how your library resources can enter a new era, visit
www.mbsDirect.net/Questia.