Where have all the children gone?
The Orphan Train Solution
7th Annual Young Adult Literature Conference
A Chicago GEAR UP Alliance Event
Directed by
The Chicago Teachers’ Center
Northeastern Illinois University
2006 - 2007
Q Conference Center
St. Charles, Illinois
Presenter: Beverly Rowls
Artist:
Eduardo Salas
The Orphan Train Solution
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Unit Plan
Strategies and Activities
Before reading strategies
Read Aloud
Previewing
Strategies to use with content area material
During reading strategies
Self-monitoring
Self-questioning
Fix-up strategies
Build a character home page
Journal or diary writing
Literature Circles
Multicultural masks – Arts integration
After reading strategies
Memorable scene
Summarizing
Retelling
Response journals
Additional Resources
List of websites (incomplete)
Book List (incomplete)
The Orphan Train Solution
The Orphan Train Solution
Strategies and Activities
Before Reading Strategies
 Access or build prior knowledge
 Establish a purpose for reading
 Focus attention on appropriate and important information
Read-Aloud
Read-aloud is the process of a teacher reading a book or other text aloud in
front of students ranging from individuals to a whole class. It allows teachers
to give students access to rich vocabulary and concepts in text that the
students may not be ready to handle independently. Additionally, it allows
teachers to model and engage students in effective reading strategies such as
questioning, making hypotheses and predictions, making connections using
prior knowledge, and relating information to personal experiences. Such
processes help students think about text and develop skills to be successful
independent readers. Many teachers are firm believers in reading aloud –
even in the secondary grades.
Tips and variations:

There are many ways to read aloud. Generally, teachers read and
students listen without following along in the text. Some teachers
simply read an ongoing fictional or nonfiction text at a set time each
day, without explicitly connecting it to the curriculum or asking the
students to answer questions about it. This kind of read-aloud
underscores the pure pleasure of literary experience. But teachers can
also read aloud to catalyze class discussions or small-group activities.
In addition, read alouds can stimulate writing, art, or drama activities.

Read aloud is an excellent way to build background knowledge about
a topic. This is especially valuable when the teacher or reader knows
the students will possess little or no knowledge about the subject.

In an "interactive" read-aloud, the teacher reads aloud but stops
periodically to ask a question or give a prompt; the students can jot
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down a response, turn and talk to a partner or small group, or share
thoughts with the whole class. The teacher can prompt the students
with traditional language arts questions ("What do you predict will
happen next?") or more whimsical questions ("If you were the
illustrator, what illustration might you draw for this part of the text?"
or "What do you think María Isabel's mother is feeling right now?
Write her internal monologue.")

The teacher should consider how a read-aloud selection will support a
particular unit or enhance the students' independent reading. For
example, if the class is studying character, the teacher might choose a
book in which strong characters change significantly over the course
of the book. The teacher might also choose texts that are generally
more difficult than those the students could read on their own.

Teachers should also choose texts that reflect the culture and/or
language of students or that facilitate a cross-cultural experience.
Teachers might invite family or community members to read literature
from their cultures.

Teachers should read aloud from various genres: fiction, nonfiction,
poetry, informational text, and children's books. This shows the
students how different genres sound. The class might also enjoy
fiction and nonfiction texts on the same topic.

Teachers can let the students choose read-aloud selections.

Read-aloud sessions should be kept to 20 minutes or less.

The listening environment should be as comfortable as possible.

Many teachers mark their texts to remind themselves where they will
pause and think aloud, or where they will prompt students to interact
with the text.

When reading texts that contain unfamiliar names or words, readers
should research and note their pronunciation.
www.learner.org/channel/workshops/tml/workshop7/teaching2.html
retrieved 10/18/06
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Previewing
Previewing is a strategy to motivate students to read. The following options
might be considered:
 Recall and consider prior personal experiences that are relevant to the
text
 Build the necessary background knowledge for the text
 Review textual elements that aid in later composition (cover blurbs,
dedication, and copyright information)
 Read about or contact the author
 Establish an organizational framework (chapter construction and
length, prologue and epilogue, explanation of terms, etc.)
 Predict the novel or text events
 Reflect on personal purposes for reading text
Strategies to use with content material
 Directed Inquiry Activity (DIA) - This activity attempts to promote
active comprehension on the part of students by having them initiate
questions in an inquiry approach.
 K-W-L Plus
 Directed Reading Activity (DRA)
 Prereading Plan (PreP)
 Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DRTA)
 ReQuest Procedure
 Survey Technique
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During reading strategies:
 Encourage active reading
 Provide a format for taking organized notes on essential information
 Provide opportunities for the use of higher-order thinking skills
Self-monitoring
Active readers are strategic readers. They are aware of their own
understanding and control over that understanding while reading. Selfmonitoring enables readers to measure their comprehension and take steps to
enhance it. When students become conscious of their thinking and
comprehension, they can deliberately apply different fix-up strategies when
comprehension breaks down. A major goal of reading instruction is to
expose students to equip them with productive self-monitoring strategies.
Several of the following techniques are useful to this end.
Self-Questioning
With this technique students generate text/story-specific questions about the
important elements of the text as they read in order to better integrate prior
knowledge with the text and the reading context. Story elements whose
meanings are extended by self-questioning might include the main character,
goals, obstacles, outcomes, and themes of the story. For non-fiction texts,
self-questioning might examine various text structures and how best to
deconstruct them. Students move from a general question to a text/storyspecific question. The generated questions may be used for group response
and discussion. They may also be used with explanatory materials.
Teachers may implement the self-questioning technique in the classroom
using the following steps:
1. The teacher models general questioning techniques for the students
2. The teacher models how to generate text-specific questions based on
the general questions while reading a text
3. The teacher and students generate questions about a text together
4. After all story elements have been covered, the students generate their
own story-specific questions
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Fix-up strategies:
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Skip a difficult word and read on
Use sentence and paragraph context to explain new terms
Reread a difficult section of text
Read further on in the text
Ask a friend for help in understanding a term or section
Use a reference book to define or explain difficult terms
Look at the word parts if the problem involves only one word
Locate and read less difficult material dealing with the same concept
Look for hands-on material that will clarify the concepts
Consult an expert.
Build a Character Home Page
This strategy is a way to incorporate technology into the project. Students
will create a "home page" for a character or person they have selected from
their readings of the biographies of Orphan Train riders or the characters
from historical fiction from that time period. These can be biographies from
the books provided or from the Internet. Students will gather information in
response to the prompts below as they read and learn more about this person
or character.
Students will write the home page from the perspective of the character. The
account should be written in the first person. The teacher should stress the
importance of not copying straight from the text or website. This strategy
can be done first as a regular document then moved to a web page (if the
technology is available)
The page should include the following basic information:
Personal information:
Experiences as an Orphan Train rider:
age (at the time when they are
foster family
writing this account)
roles and responsibilities in this
family
family
siblings
knowledge of family of origin
friends
how it felt to be a rider (glad for the
experience, ashamed, angry, etc.,
and why they felt that way)
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Journal writing
A journal is a continual series of writings made by a person in response to
their life experiences and events. Diaries contain a description of daily
events. A journal may include those descriptions, but it also contains
reflections on what took place and expresses emotions and understandings
about them.
Have students maintain a journal or diary of their feelings and reflections as
they read the biographies of Orphan Train riders. This will help them make
better connections with what they have read and allow them to step into the
shoes of the person and remark on the experiences from a personal vantage
point. Provide students with a choice as to which type of document they
would like to keep. Be sure to model for students what an entry might look
like for a journal as opposed to a diary. Give them multiple opportunities to
practice this type of writing before having them work on this project while
they read the biographies.
For more information on journal writing, check the following website:
www.42explore.com/journl.htm
Literature Circles
This is a way to get students more excited about a particular topic. With this
strategy, students choose their own reading materials from a wide selection
of materials on the topic (see the website and book list pages). Small groups
are temporarily formed based on the book chosen. Each group reads a
different book. The groups meet regularly based on a schedule to discuss
their reading. Students may use either written or drawn notes to guide both
their reading and the discussion. The topic of the discussion comes from the
students. These discussions about the book should be open and natural. Each
participant should be free to make personal connections, ask open-ended
questions or digress. One way to support the process is to assign each
member of the group to a particular task or role: discussion director, title
tracker, quote collector, trait tracker, summarizer, or literary illuminator.
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Discussion Director – develop a list of high level questions or topics that the
group will use to discuss the part of the book being read. The questions
should be ones that require thought and get everyone talking and sharing
their opinions and reactions. These should not be ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions or
ones with factual answers. As a rule, write three questions per chapter.
Title Tracker – analyze the titles of the chapters. Be prepared to analyze
between four and six chapter titles. After each chapter, write a paragraph
discussing the chapter title. Consider both literal and figurative meanings for
the title. Be specific with your explanations and include supporting quotes.
Quote Collector – record the special sections of the text you want the group
to discuss. The purpose is to help people remember and recognize the
important sections of the text. Select five passages of either dialogue or
narration from the story for the group to reread, discuss and think about. The
passages should be important things for everyone to notice, remember, or
think about. Choose a variety of different types of passages. Make sure
everyone is on the right page before you read the passage aloud or have the
group read silently. When the discussion begins to slow, explain why you
selected the passage and ask for feedback.
Trait Tracker – trace the development of the characters over the course of
the reading selection. Briefly describe the character. What did you discover
about the characters’ traits, motivations, conflicts, changes, etc? Bring
printed copies or photocopies of your information for each member of your
group.
Summarizer – prepare a brief summary of each chapter for the reading. The
summary should cover the key points and the main highlights of the reading
selection. Summaries must include very specific details for support. Write
the summary in complete sentences. Bring printed or photocopies for each
member of the group.
Literary Illuminator – show your insight into literature by discussing one
literary element or technique present in each chapter of the section to be
read. You might include characterization, theme, symbolism, conflict,
imagery, figurative language, style, etc. Discuss how this element or
technique is developed over the course of this chapter and its significance to
the overall understanding of the text.
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The teacher is not a member of a group or an instructor. She or he serves as
a facilitator. Literature circles can be evaluated by the teachers’ observations
and student self-evaluation. When books are finished, the readers may share
with their classmates the, form new groups for new reading choices.
Think-Alouds
A think-aloud is a procedure in which students or teachers simply think out
loud as they work through a procedure. Think-alouds may be used before,
during, or after reading by teachers to model new strategies. After
demonstrating new strategies through the think-aloud, teachers should
structure activities where students may practice, likewise using the thinkaloud technique with new text and working with a partner. Think-alouds are
useful also after reading as an assessment device in a reading conference:
Students read a text aloud and say what they think as they read, making
audible the comprehension strategies they employ.
When using a think-aloud to teach before-reading strategies, the teacher
verbalizes the thought processes used by effective readers in order to set a
purpose for reading, to preview the text, to recall prior knowledge, and to
make predictions.
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Multicultural masks
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After reading strategies:
 Provide a summary
 Promote self-questioning
 Evaluate comprehension of important information
After-reading activities should teach students to review their understanding
of text, relate new ideas to their background knowledge, revisit the text to
clarify and extend meanings, make responsible interpretations and criticisms
of ideas from the text, revise their thinking, apply the information to other
texts and disciplines, and remember crucial learnings for future application.
Memorable Scene
This is an opportunity for small group projects. Students identify an incident
in the life of a character whose biography they have read. They then rewrite
the incident into a scene that they and members of their small groups will
present to the rest of the class.
Summarizing
Summarizing fosters understanding and remembering as well as develops
interpretations of texts. Proficiency in summarizing involves steps that grow
in complexity and that require varying degrees of practice. The following
summarizing procedures include suggestions from the basic to the complex:
1. Delete trivial information
2. Delete redundant information
3. Generate general terms to encompass groups of less important ideas
(for example, food for cereal, pizza, hot dogs, etc.)
4. Locate topic sentences and other key statements and use them in the
summary when appropriate
5. Compose statements of main ideas when none appear in the text
Introduce each component of the strategy with small passages and increase
the amount as students increase their skills. Allow students to practice orally,
as well as in writing.
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Retelling
Retelling differs from summarization. While the latter requires a telescoping
of information to produce a condensed representation, the former demands
an elaboration in which the teller recalls and even recreates a story and its
effect. Teachers use retelling as a tool to diagnose and to increase student
comprehension and to help students recognize textual organization and
retain information from texts. Used by students, it increases the development
of interpretive understanding. There are four general forms of asking
students to retell selections in their own words.
 Oral-To-Oral Retelling: The student listens to a selection and retells it
orally. This approach may be most appropriate with fables or
folktales.
 Oral-To-Written Retelling: The student listens to a selection but
retells it in writing. A difficult chapter of a "whole class" novel or text
might be read aloud and then retold individually.
 Reading-To-Oral Retelling: The student reads a selection silently and
retells it orally. This is a diagnostic component of many published
informal reading inventories.
 Reading-To-Written Retelling: The student reads a selection silently
and retells it in writing. This method is easily practiced in a Reading
Workshop environment.
Response Journals
Response journals are places where students independently reflect on their
readings with the teacher or with other students. Journals allow students to
take control of their own learning. In journals students respond to what they
have experienced and learned, how it relates to them person ally, how they
learned it, how they used it, what still needs to be learned and clarified, as
well as other things. Once students are aware of their own learning, they
become able to select, implement, and evaluate strategies that are effective
for them. Reading journals in particular enable students to see what sorts of
responses they make (that is, to inspect the stances from which they
respond), to reflect on their own reading and on literature, and to set goals
for their own reading growth.
Structure the experience to ensure that it is productive. The teacher may
require students to make entries before, during, or after reading. Generally,
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they should require brief entries at first, and then be sure to integrate the
writings with other important class activities. At key points, students should
share entries with the class, the teacher, or another student. Response
journals should include only thoughts that the student writer is willing to
share with the teacher or class.
By sharing their entries, students have the opportunity to clarify and
reinforce what they are learning about their thinking and about literature.
Peers learn new strategies and when to use them. The teacher observes
which strategies students are using and uses this information to plan daily
instruction. Journal entries should never be corrected or graded for content.
Teacher-student discussion about the entries, however, is crucial.
When introducing response journals, teachers should explain that they are
places for students to record their thoughts in order to become better readers.
Entries could include attempted reading strategies, reading problems, when
they may apply a strategy in the future, and what made them attempt a
particular strategy. Students should also respond to what they read by
reflecting, first on that which seems important to them, and then on such
considerations as plot, literary technique, and author's purpose. Response
journals will only be effective if the teacher continually demonstrates the
many ways that the journals can be used.
The teacher may use prompts to help students get started or lead a
brainstorming session that produces a list of possible questions or topics for
response.
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Partial Book List
Fiction:
Bunting, E. (1996). Train to somewhere. New York: Clarion Books.
Kay, V. (2005). Orphan Train. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
LaFaye, A. (2004). Worth. New York: Aladdin Paperbacks.
Nixon, Joan Lowery, Orphan Train Series (various dates and publishers)
1. A Family Apart
2. Caught In The Act
3. In The Face of Danger
4. A Place to Belong
5. A Dangerous Promise
6. Keeping Secrets
7. Circle of Love
Non-Fiction:
Endorf, C. M. (2005). Plains Bound: Fragile Cargo. Denver: Outskirts
Press, Inc.
Holt, M. I. (1992). The Orphan Trains: Placing out in America. Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press.
O’Conner, S. (2000). Orphan Trains: The story of Charles Loring Brace and
the children he saved and failed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Warren, A. (1996). Orphan Train Rider: One Boy’s True Story. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company.
Warren, A. (2001). We rode the Orphan Trains. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company.
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Websites
The Children’s Aid Society – The Orphan Train Movement
www.childrensaidsociety.org/about/trains
National Orphan Train Complex
www.orphantraindepot.com
Orphan Train Heritage Society of America, Inc.
www.orphantrainriders.com/
The Orphan Train Riders - Research Materials
www.orphantrainriders.com/res-mat11.html
Charles Loring Brace (1826 – 1890)
darkwing.uoregan.edu/~adoption/people/brace.html
Illinois Currents – The Orphan Train – part of American history
www.lib.niu.edu/ipo/2002/ic020405.html
Encyclopedia of adoption
encyclopedia.adoption.com/entry/Orphan-Train/266/1.html
Transcript of “The American Experience” PBS documentary
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/orphan
Orphan Train Riders History (by Howard Hurd)
www.hamilton.net/subscribers/hurd/index.html
Orphan Trains of Kansas
www.kancoll.org/articles/orphans
Orphan Trains of Iowa
www.iagenweb.org/iaorphans
Orphan Trains of Wisconsin
www.rootsweb.com/~wiorphan
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