Jackie's Nine offers insight into the life and values of Jackie Robinson. Jackie's daughter, Sharon Robinson, paints an inspirational portrait of her father and the values she associates with his life. In each chapter, Sharon Robinson describes the challenges that both her father and she encountered and describes a real-world hero who exemplifies one of Jackie's nine values. From Christopher Reeves to Michael Jordan, we learn about the nine principles that Jackie lived his life by, no matter what the challenge.

To make an inference and support it with evidence in a well-written paragraph.

Standard: Student makes inferences and draws conclusions about story elements (e.g., main and subordinate characters; events; setting; theme; missing details; relationships among story elements, such as the relevance of setting to mood and meaning in text) and student uses paragraph form in writing

Teaching Plan

"Valuable" Baseball Cards

Materials

• Thesaurus (a few copies that students can share)
• Index cards

1. Jackie Robinson's daughter labels each one of her chapters with a value that her father possessed. Read the first chapter out loud to the students and discuss how the title of the chapter is appropriate to the event that Sharon Robinson writes about.
2. Have students write down their answer in a paragraph. Read over the answers as a class. This is a good time to discuss how to write a paragraph. Model topic sentences, summarizing and incorporating evidence into the paragraph.
3. Have students think of other ways to describe Robinson (industrious, loving, confident). For each characteristic listed, they should provide a one to two sentence explanation of why they feel it is appropriate to describe Robinson. A thesaurus may be helpful to assist the students.
4. Give the students index cards and tell them that they are going to create a baseball card for Jackie Robinson. They can draw a picture of Robinson and underneath the picture, list the characteristics that he displayed throughout his life. For one of the characteristics mentioned on the baseball card, they should write a well-written paragraph that explains how Robinson displayed this quality. Have students write a rough draft before they do the final copy. Have students write their final draft of the paragraph on the back of their baseball card.
5. Tell students to summarize and/or provide quotes and on the back of the card as evidence.

Follow-up Activity

Have students create baseball "value" cards for themselves. Which values do they live by and how have they demonstrated it in their life?

Other Books About Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson (Baseball Legends) by John F. Grabowski and Jim Murray
This is an overview of the major struggles and accomplishments of this baseball hero.

Jackie and Me: A Baseball Card Adventure by Dan Gutman
Going back in time by means of his baseball card, Joe learns about the challenges Jackie Robinson had to face as the first black Major League Baseball player.

Other Books by Sharon Robinson

Stealing Home: An Intimate Family Portrait by the Daughter of Jackie Robinson