Perfect Pairings

Peanut Butter and Jelly. Chocolate and Strawberries. Steak and chimichurri.

Sometimes two things are just destined to go together. When you find two books that just make sense as pairings, an English teacher can't help but get a little excited. The Giver has long been on our district list of approved whole class novels as well as a core text (one of the two books we must teach) as well as the only book that is core for both on-level and Pre-AP ELA. Our 8th grade team put it on the summer reading last year to make room in the year for other text throughout the year. Dissatisfied with last year's pairing to How to Read Literature Like a Professor for Kids*, I was on the search for the perfect match.

 I started with my list of wants: female protagonist (all the core books have male protagonists!), can be easily connected to The Giver, and is preferably non-fiction. So what better to pair with a futuristic dystopia in which all people are the same than to pair it with a memoir in which entire groups of people were being threatened with annihilation to make the world Hitler's version of his "perfect place"? Enter one of the most beautifully written Holocaust memoirs I have ever read: The Cage by Ruth Minsky Sender.

It is obvious something major happened prior to The Community coming into being, and that major thing was most likely a genocide. What a great way to root us in the purpose of The Giver - to warn us against giving up rights for the "safety" of sameness - in the very real tragedy of The Holocaust. Add in that Jonas and Riva share much in common (character traits, the position of having to take on a parental role to siblings, etc) while the plots and settings being radically different. Match made in literary heaven!

While my students read, they will be comparing and contrasting the texts. A copy of this assignment is in my TpT store for FREE!

*Make sure you do preview How to Read Literature Like a Professor for Kids prior to ever assigning it. I purposefully had students only read the 10 chapters that applied to The Giver, which made students skip the two chapters that unfortunately reference sex, the vampires and ghosts chapter (which  while I wish they had done more hinting than blatant talk, I understood keeping the topic int he kids version), and The Shakespeare chapter that references a Woody Allen movie for no reason. Ugh! I wouldn't know of any middle schooler that would even watch a Woody Allen movie and there are so many better references to Shakespeare kids would get. And referencing the phrase "sex party" anywhere in a book designed for tweens? What editor let that go through?! I can't imagine the amount of teachers that have not assigned that book because of those two chapters, which is really unfortunate.

Abydos Conference 2015

Top three highlights of Abydos Conference 2015:
3. Alana Morris of Vocabulary Unplugged fame in one chart explained what I've been trying to explain to non-ELA teachers since the adoption of the new TEKS: all those old comprehension strategies we used to teach: Using Prior Knowledge, Making Connections, Questioning, Visualizing, Inferring, Summarizing, Evaluating and Synthesizing. When you look at the STAAR test questions, minus a handful in summarization and comparing, the questions all pop in inferencial thinking. Big takeaway: Number 12 is never coming back. The question stem will probably never be seen again. We need to move past looking at number 12 from the released test and toward the type of thinking we need to train our students to become. In order for our scores to grow instead of stagnate, we have to train the kids to be inferential thinkers.

2. Anne Stone's Classical Evaluation. Brilliant! I created a quick video on it for absent students (I literally just put my iPhone on my document cam, hit record, and posted in my conference period. AKA I totally am guilty of the black blank sides of doom. I hold my head in shame.) It helps to address the issue of under-developed support paragraphs in expository writing.
1. Kaye Price-Hawkins referred to me as "My friend, Sara" when I answered a question. Granted she was just reading my nametag, but still, squee! She took us through Dialogue with the Text which she adapted and put on a nifty bookmark for kids right here. Her website is full of priceless goodies! Go, go!