I don’t think I could pick my favorite part in Gary Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars, but my 7th graders and I had a pretty fantastic time reading the scene where two rats fall from the ceiling in Mrs. Baker’s classroom while she’s being observed by BIG IMPORTANT PEOPLE. That’s just the beginning of what happens on the Ides of March. There’s a track meet, there’s a subtle and perfect middle school romance clip, there’s a chase, there’s a crash where the rats that started it all meet their totally bloody and disgusting demise. Reading it is all around one of the best ways you can spend time with 7th graders.
I don’t believe I am exaggerating when I write that Schmidt’s stories are truly gifts to adolescents (well, adults too, but that’s a post for another day). My students laugh at all the right parts, they gasp in exasperation when people do something stupid or disappointing (I don’t care if that Mickey Mantle bit is true; he will alway be a jerk in my book after reading this story), and during discussions I can tell that these characters matter to the students. The kids identify with the people they meet on the page.
I think it’s important to talk about things like plot and theme, and analyze character and dialogue, and I do that as much as possible, but I want to make sure that when they’ve encountered a top-notch story, my students have a chance to sit and play around with it. Which words really bring out the action of the story? What images come to mind when you’re reading this story?
One way to get the kids involved is to have them summarize the story. Another is to read it out loud (or take turns reading it), stopping at certain points to analyze and discuss the story. I’ve done and will do both of these in my classroom, but last week I had a different idea for the students: A Haiku Comic Strip.
The rat race scene is about twenty paragraphs long, so I assigned each student one paragraph. They were to create a five square comic strip, and write a haiku given the paragraph they were assigned.
First, they picked out all the verbs in their reading.
After sketching a comic strip, they were to write a haiku poem that captured that paragraph’s main idea.
Here are some of the 7th grader’s Haiku Comic Strips.
It was a fun, creative way to summarize text (if I do say so myself).
And in case you’re interested, I have a guest post on the IMAGE blog, “Good Letters.” You can find it here.
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