The Good Luck Cat

Developed by Jill Couture for Arlee Elementary School

Text Title, Author and Citation

Harjo, Joy. The Good Luck Cat.San Diego: Harcourt Inc.,2000.

About the Author
Joy Harjo is a multi-talented artist of the Muskoke/Creek Nation. She is an internationally known poet, performer, writer and musician. Her poetry awards include the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award, Oklahoma Book Awards, 2003; The American Indian Festival of Words Author Award from the Tulsa City County Library; the 2000 Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, and many more. She co-edited an anthology of contemporary Native women's writing: Reinventing the Enemy's Language, Native Women's Writing of North Americaand wrote the award-winning children's book The Good Luck Cat.

Harjo's first music CD, Letter from the End of the 20th Century, was released in 1997 and has recently released a second CD. Harjo has performed internationally, from the Arctic Circle in Norway at the Riddu Riddu Festival, to Madras, India, to the Ford Theater in Los Angeles. She has been featured on Bill MoyersThe Power of the Word series. Harjo was also the narrator for the Turner The Native Americans series and the narrator for the Emmy award-winning show, Navajo Codetalkers for National Geographic.

“Joy Harjo Bio.” Joy Harjo. 25 June 2007 <

Text Summary

Some cats are good luck. You pet them and good things happen. There aren’t many in the world, maybe only one in millions and billions. Woogie is one of those cats. But can a good luck cat’s good luck run out?

Tribe(s) Represented in Text

Aunt from Oklahoma – author member of Muskoke/Creek Nation

Setting of Text

small town/urban

Genre of Text

picture book

Suggested Grade Level(s)

read aloud 1-2 grade (independent read for grade 3-4)

Time Required

30 mins

Supplies and Materials

The Good Luck Cat, chart paper, marker

Background Information

owning/losing a pet, knowledge of story that cats have 9 lives

Implementation Level, Essential Understandings and MT Content Standards

Banks - O’meter / Essential Understandings – Big Ideas / Montana Content Standards
4 / Social Action / 1-Diversity between tribal groups is great. / 5-History represents subjective experience & perspective. / Reading
1.1,1.4,2.3, 4.4 / Social Studies
3 / Transformative / x / 2-Diversity between individuals is great. / 6-Federal Indian policies shifted through 7 major periods.
2 / Additive / 3-Oral histories are valid & predate European contact. / x / 7-Tribes reserved a portion of their land-base through treaties. / Science
3.3 / Other(s)
Math
7.2
1 / Contributions / x / 4-Ideologies, traditions, beliefs, & spirituality persist / 8-Three forms of sovereignty exist - federal, state, & tribal.

Instructional Outcomes – Learning Targets

Content Area Standards

Essential Understandings

Essential Understanding 2: There is great diversity among individual American Indians as identity is developed, defined and redefined by many entities, organizations and people. There is a continuum of Indian identity ranging from assimilated to traditional and is unique to each individual. There is no generic American Indian.

Essential Understanding 3: The ideologies of Native traditional beliefs and spirituality persist into modern day life as tribal cultures, traditions and languages are still practiced by many American Indian people and are incorporated into how tribes govern and manage their affairs.

Additionally, each tribe has its own oral history beginning with their origins that are as valid as written histories. These histories pre-date the “discovery” of North America.

Essential Understanding 7: Reservations are land that have been reserved by the tribes for their own use through treaties and was not “given” to them. The principle that land should be acquired from the Indians only through their consent with treaties involved three assumptions:

  1. That both parties to treaties were sovereign powers.
  2. That Indian tribes had some form of transferable title to the land.
  3. That acquisition of Indian lands was solely a government matter not to be left to individual colonists.

Science

Students will

3.3 develop models that trace the life cycles of different plants and animals and discuss how they differ from species to species

Skill Sets

Reading

Students will

1.1 make predictions and connections between new material and previous information/experiences

1.4 demonstrate basic understanding of main ideas and some supporting details

2.3 identify literary devices (e.g. figurative language and exaggeration)

4.4 read and provide oral, written, and /or artistic responses to diverse perspectives, cultures and issues in traditional and contemporary literature

Math

Students will

7.2 represent and describe mathematical and real-world relationships

Learning Experiences–Text-Based Inquiry

Before

Discuss cover, make predictions about what story might be about, whether about a cat or people and a cat? How many of you have had a cat? What is a good luck cat? What would make it lucky? What would a bad luck cat be?

During

After page 2 – how did cat give them good luck? Then, briefly discuss concept of cats having 9 lives.

Stop and discuss every few pages; for example, after page 2 ask, how did cat give them good luck? Or reflect upon comments made by listeners (text-to-self connections) – responsibilities of being a pet owner (don’t put in the dryer, not in the trunk)

Predict the ending. Did the cat die? Is it lost? Is it having babies?

After

Tie the story to the Essential Understandings with any or all of the following questions:Where does Woogie live? Is it like (your town here) or different? How can you tell?

What is Woogie’s family like? What can you tell about them from Woogie’s story?

What do they like to do together? Does your family have special activities that they like to do together sometimes? What are they? (This is a great place to do a Venn Diagram teaching similarities and differences between the types of activities families do. This gets to Essential Understanding 2.) Clearly, powwow is the answer to this question leading to Essential Understanding 4.

What does the girl telling the story think that Woogie’s purr sounds like? Why did she say a drum? What kind of drum do you think she meant?

What kind of outfits do you think they use for powwow? Do you know what a bustle is? Who would wear it? A man or a woman?

Who is in Woogie’s family? (girl, her parents, cousins, Aunt Shelly etc.) Do any of you live near your cousins? It looks like the girl telling Woogie’s story gets to play with her cousins sometimes? Do you? (Again EU 4 and EU 2)

Finally, what does the girl’s Aunt Shelly like to do? How does having a “Good Luck Cat” help her? Have you ever played bingo?

Discuss how the cat was really a good luck cat andhow the girl felt.

Assessment

Teacher observation and student participation

Teacher Notes and Cautions

BE PREPARED to hear ALL the pet stories about ALL the kids’ pets!

*Make sure to stress responsibilities of having a pet so kids don’t go home and try the dryer trick on their own cat!

Vocabulary

concordance by Amazon.com, found at the following website: or search Amazon.com for the book’s title; select the title to get the book’s details, then scroll down under “Inside this Book.” You will find a link called “Concordance,” the 100 most frequently used words in the book.

Extension Activities

  • Sequencing activities (sequencing events, writing or reading comic strips)
  • Work with ordinal numbers
  • “Let’s play (math, spelling, vocabulary, Salish etc) Bingo now; I will teach you all how.” Use the book and read aloud time to introduce a simple drill or reinforcement activity using Bingo! (like Auntie in the story)
  • Read poetry or listen to the songs written by Joy Harjo

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