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 | books and photographs of Indian and Pakistani history and culture; map of India and Pakistan; map of pre-1947 British India; books of oral histories of migration and family memories. (See the Resources section of this document.)
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A Place in Time
Create a display with images of and information (both historical and current) about India and Pakistan. Include books and pictures about both countries. If possible, display a map showing the region with its correct political boundaries, as well as a map showing the political boundaries in the region just prior to the 1947 granting of independence.
Gather together books about India and Pakistan, or books presenting oral histories of migration and family memories. Place these in the classroom library or reading area. Encourage students to add their own family stories to the collection. (See Language Arts activities.)
Additional Ideas for Preparing the Classroom
 | Set up an "Ancestor's Table" with photos of students' families in their countries of origin and drawings students make of cultural artifacts (family heirlooms or things that hold memories).
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| Create a display of cultural artifacts including drawings, photos, books, and other objects of cultural significance to students and their heritage cultures. You may want to contact art or culture organizations, such as Folk Art International (see Resources section of this document) for the possible loan of textiles and other objects for display in your classroom.
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| Bring into the classroom the necessary supplies and materials to hold a tea. These might include a teapot, teacups and saucers, small plates, napkins, juice (or caffeine-free herbal tea), and biscuits (or tea cookies).
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Family Memories
Students share their knowledge of family history by recalling stories told by relatives and describing treasured objects that hold special memories.
30 min.
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whole class
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CA Language Arts Standards (Listening and Speaking) 1.2: Connect and relate prior experiences, insights, and ideas with those of a speaker; 1.3: Respond to questions with appropriate elaboration.
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Explain to students that the book you are about to read together is a fictional story about a family in the United States that is originally from India. Point out that the story contains information about the family's history and culture, which is narrated through stories that an elder relative tells to a younger member of the family.
Engage students in a discussion about family history by asking the questions that follow. Record their responses on the board.
Who are the special people in your life at home?
What types of stories do they tell?
Have you heard stories about the past from elder relatives or friends?
Who tells the stories?
What are they about?
When are they told?
What is their purpose? (For example, to convey history or to entertain.)
Explain to students that the elder relative in the story has an object, a teacup, that is of special importance in the family's history. Ask students to share information about objects in their homes that hold memories. You might ask:
| What object or objects hold special memories in your family? |
| What are the memories? |
| Why do the objects hold those memories? |
| How do you keep the memories alive? |
More generally, you might ask students to tell about favorite/important things in their family and why they are valued.
Additional Ideas for Pre-reading Activities
| Engage students in a discussion of special activities, traditions, or rituals that bring the members of their family together. Encourage them to mention everyday activities in addition to major holidays and celebrations.
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Diving In
30 min.
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whole class; small group/pairs
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CA Language Arts Standard (Reading) 2.4: Students make and modify predictions about forthcoming information.
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Introduce the book to students in a large or small group. The focus of this first reading should be reading for pleasure. Encourage students to enjoy the beauty of the book and the story it tells. In order to foster this enjoyment, try some of the following activities:
Guide students to explore the book first by taking them on a "picture walk" through the book, helping them to think about the story as it is told in the illustrations. Have students pair up and discuss what they see in the illustrations as you turn the pages of the book in front of them. At the end of the picture walk, ask students to share one interesting thing that they observed in the illustrations.
Once they've shared their observations about the book, ask students what story they think the book tells. List their predictions on the board.
Read sections aloud to the large group, or have students read the book in small groups, in pairs, or on their own. As students are reading, suggest that they stop occasionally to check their predictions and make new ones. Once the reading is complete, ask students to revisit their predictions and revise them as necessary.
At the beginning of this first reading, you may also want to introduce or review with students a strategy they can use to monitor their own comprehension, such as the Self-Questioning Strategy. To do so, you might model the strategy after reading the first page of the story (page 3). You might say something like, After reading this page, I know that a boy named Neel is telling the story about his family. Neel says that Chachaji, his father's elderly uncle, is in charge of teatime. I wonder why teatime is important to the family and what it means to say that Chachaji is "in charge of" it. I'll read on to see if I can find the answers to my questions.
Words Across Borders
Students examine key words and concepts as well as story words that come from Hindi.
20 min.
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whole class
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CA Language Arts Standards (Reading) 1.5: Demonstrate knowledge of levels of specificity among grade-appropriate words and explain the importance of these relations; 1.6: Use sentence and word context to find the meanings of unknown words; 1.7: Use a dictionary to learn the meaning and other features of unknown words.
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| chart paper, markers
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Remind students that Neel's family originally came from the area that is now India and Pakistan. Explain that Chachaji and his mother (Neel's great-grandmother) were refugees when they crossed the newly formed border between the two countries.
Use this brief oral review as the starting point for a discussion about story words and related vocabulary having to do with immigration and crossing borders. Be sure to include the terms listed below. Ask students to share their prior knowledge of each word's meaning, or guide them to use story context or a dictionary to determine the meaning. Ask students for other words they could add to the "Related Terms" list.
Story Words
refugees (pp. 12, 24)
border (pp. 12, 24)
safety (p. 21)
fleeing (p. 24)
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Related Terms
homeland
nation
partition
immigration, emigration, migration
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Point out to students that another set of important story words with which they might be unfamiliar are from Hindi, one of the languages of northern India. Most of these words appear in italic type in the story. Ask students to use context to try to determine the meanings. Offer assistance for those words with which students are having difficulty, or direct them to the collection of books about India in your classroom.
Hindi words:
chachaji (CHAH-chah-jee) (p. 3 and throughout): Chacha means "uncle," usually a father's brother. In this story, the chacha is Neel's father's uncle. Everyone in the family calls him chachaji. Ji is an honorific, used when speaking respectfully.
masala chai (ma-SAH-la chai) (p. 3): Masala means "blended spices" and chai means "tea." Masala chai is a spiced tea, usually served with milk and sugar.
beta (BEY-ta) (p. 7): "son" or "child"
samosa (sa-MOH-sa) (p. 18): a fried savory turnover made of a pastry crust stuffed with vegetables, usually spiced potatoes and peas.
gulab jamun (GOO-lahb JAH-mun) (p. 18): a sweet dish made of flour, milk, and sugar, marinated in a sugar syrup, and flavored with saffron and rose water.
Additional Vocabulary Development Activities
| Exploring Compound Words: Have students find the compound words in the story. Write these on the board. Then have volunteers separate each word into the two smaller words that make it up. Next, ask them to use the meanings of the two smaller words to help them determine the meaning of the compound word. Explain that the meanings of the two smaller words will not always help them with the meaning of the compound, in which case they may want to consult a dictionary to find or confirm the meaning.
Compound words: teatime (p. 3); teacup (p. 4); grandmother (p. 7); homework, bedtime (p. 8); living room (p.11); openmouthed (p. 12); without (p. 15); tiptoe, backyard, anymore (p. 16); birthday, ice cream (p. 18); weekend, basketball (p. 20); sunrise (p. 24); afternoon, hallways, sunshine (p. 28); mantelpiece (p.31)
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| Prefixes and Suffixes: Explain to students that some words are made up of base words and prefixes or suffixes (word parts added to the beginning or ending of a base word that change the base word's meaning). Write the following story words on the board: breakable, unthinkable, useful, careful, unfold. Work with students to identify the base word and the prefix and/or suffix in each word. Then guide volunteers to use the meaning of the base words and the affixes to figure out the meaning of the original word.
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| Words on the Family Tree: If necessary, help students understand the terms great-uncle and great-grandmother by drawing and labeling a family tree.
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Story Within a Story
Students track their comprehension by creating a timeline that shows the two main story lines in the selection.
30 min.
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pairs
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CA Language Arts Standards (Reading) 3.0: Students read and respond to a wide variety of significant works of children's literature; 3.1: Distinguish common forms of literature; 3.4: Determine the underlying theme or author's message in fiction and nonfiction text.
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| pencils; story timeline worksheets (click to download)—one copy for each pair of students
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Have a volunteer give a brief oral summary of Chachaji's Cup. If necessary, point out that the narrative contains a story within a story: the main story (an example of realistic fiction) is about Neel and his relationship with his great-uncle Chachaji; the story within the story (an example of historical fiction) is about Chachaji, his mother, and the teacup during the time of the partition of India.
Ask students to work with a partner. Duplicate and distribute to each pair a copy of the timeline worksheet. Explain to partners that they should reread the story together and use the worksheet to keep track of events in both the main story and the story within the story.
As partners read each page, have them decide which story it belongs to and then record the significant events on the appropriate part of the worksheet.
When students have finished reading, ask them to review their work. They can then work together to write a brief summary of each story. Ask them to think about how the author has woven the two stories together. Then engage all students in a discussion about what the author's message might be and how the two interwoven stories were used to convey it.
Additional Comprehension Activities
| Sorting Storyboards: An alternative way for students to keep track of the two stories is to have them create illustrated storyboards for each story. To do so, they should draw a picture with a caption that describes each major event, page by page through the story. When they have finished, ask them to sort the pictures by which of the two stories they illustrate. Then have them use each set of storyboards to retell the stories.
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| Noting Shifts in Time: Ask students to identify moments in the story where a shift in time occurs. To do so, they should look for sequence words and phrases such as when, often, once, after, the year passed, sometimes, at my birthday party that year, that night, the next week, the night before, in the early morning, the following afternoon, and when we got home. By identifying these moments, students will gain a better sense of the sequence of events.
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Family Memories
Students make inferences about how the main characters grow and change; students deepen their understanding of the story's main themes.
30 min.
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small group
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CA Language Arts Standards (Reading) 3.0: Students read and respond to a wide variety of significant works of children's literature. They distinguish between the structural features of the text and literary terms or elements (e.g., theme, plot, setting, characters); 3.3: Determine what characters are like by what they say or do and by how the author or illustrator portrays them; 3.4: Determine the underlying theme or author's message in fiction and nonfiction text.
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| paper, pencils, character worksheets (click to download)—one copy for each group of students
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Have students work in small groups to review the story to identify ways in which the main characters (Neel and Chachaji) change and ways in which they stay the same during the course of the story. Provide each group with a copy of the character worksheet. Ask one member of the group to act as the recorder.
Ask group members to review the beginning, middle, and end of the story and to identify the characters' actions and words that tell something about what each character is like or how each character feels.
Model making an inference about Chachaji from evidence gathered in the first part of the story. For example, from the fact that Chachaji asks Neel whether he wants plain tea or masala chai (p. 3), you might infer that Chachaji is proud of his Indian culture and wishes to pass it along to the younger members of his family.
Have group members look back at the actions and words they identified in the worksheet and make some inferences about what each of the characters is like or how the character feels. The recorder should add the group's observations to the worksheet.
Lead a discussion in which students share their findings. Prompt them to talk about the characters and how they develop, with questions such as the following:
How does Neel feel about Chachaji at the beginning of the story? Do his feelings change as he grows older? If so, how? How does he feel at the end of the story? What do you think are the reasons for these changes?
What does Neel learn about his family's history from Chachaji? How do you think he feels about what he learns? What does Neel mean when he says, "You don't have to be shiny new to hold memories"?
Other Ideas for Literary Response and Analysis
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