Wonder

In the last several weeks, I've seen the cover in pins and posts, its unique design burrowing into my memory. Finally, I looked for it. The only copy available, digital. I'd rather turn the pages of a book, but the touch pad accomplished the same thing, getting me from the first page to the last in a day. Now more than the cover has burrowed: the story also is lodged in my mind.

The book is Wonder by R. J. Palacio.

How can this book be useful in our language arts classes, home or school?

1. Read it as a reader. Enjoy. Apply.

2. Teach point of view. Each of the eight parts is written from a different point of view, sometimes Auggie's--the main character--other times his sister's or a friend's. For a picture book written with a similar structure, see Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne. Maybe reading these books will prompt students to write their own stories from various points of view.

3. Read it as a writer. Notice the author's creativity in including poems, book excerpts, letters, e-mails, a Facebook notification, texts, precepts, a graduation program, a commencement address...and even a high school boy's point of view with nary a capital letter. (I tutor a student who is allergic to capital letters. He may be fixing a paragraph or two.  Shhh, don't tell!)

Then investigate closer still. Below I show you the beginnings of my closer investigation into the text. It's amazing what you see when you slow down and study the author's craft. When students do the same, their minds are attentive to new possibilities they can try in their writing. Find a blank chart here.

(I'm sorry I don't have page numbers. The digital version doesn't include them.)

What I Notice	Specific Examples from the Text
1. The author varies the lengths of her sentences to give them a natural rhythm.	“I was really bummed when Christopher moved away three years ago. (11) We were both around seven then. (6) We used to spend hours playing with our Star Wars action figures and dueling with our lightsabers. (17) I miss that.” (3)
2. Lots of fragments	·         “Twenty-seven since I was born.” ·         “Or maybe I should say angelic.” ·         “A little peephole.”
3. Lots of compound sentences	·         “The bigger ones happened before I was even four years old, so I don’t remember those.” ·         “The last surgery I had was eight months ago, and I probably won’t have to have any more for another couple of years.” ·         “She once tried to draw me a Darth Vader, but it ended up looking like some weird mushroom-shaped robot.”
4. AAAWWUBBIS sentences	·         “Since I’ve never been to a real school before, I am pretty much totally and completely petrified.” ·         “When I came out of Mom’s stomach, she said the whole room got very quiet.”
5. Repetition	·         “So I’ve gotten used to not complaining, and I’ve gotten used to not bothering Mom and Dad with little stuff. I’ve gotten used to figuring things out on my own: how to put toys together, how to organize my life so I don’t miss friends’ birthday parties, how to stay on top of my schoolwork so I never fall behind in class.” ·         “My worst day, worst fall, worst headache, worst bruise, worst cramp, worst mean thing anyone could say has always been nothing compared to what August has gone through.” ·         “I wish I could ask him this stuff. I wish he would tell me how he feels.” ·         “We need to let him, help him, make him grow up.”
6. An extended metaphor	“August is the Sun. Me and Mom and Dad are planets orbiting the Sun. The rest of our family and friends are asteroids and comets floating around the planets and orbiting the Sun. The only celestial body that doesn’t orbit August the Sun is Daisy the dog, and that’s only because to her little doggy eyes August’s face doesn’t look very different from any other human’s face.”
7. Similes	·         “To Daisy, all our faces look alike, as flat and pale as the moon.” ·         “His head is pinched in on the sides where the ears should be, like someone used giant pliers and crushed the middle part of his face.” ·         “Out of all my features, my ears are the ones I hate the most. They are like tiny closed fists on the sides of my face.”
8. The use of the colon	·         “Mom remembers exactly what the nurse whispered in her ear when the doctor told her I probably wouldn’t live through the night: “Everyone born of God overcometh the world. ·         There’s one shot of me at my third birthday: Dad’s right behind me while Mom’s holding the cake with three lit candles, and in back of us are Tata and Poppa….” ·         “And on the other side of the peephole, there were two Augusts: the one I saw blindly, and the one other people saw.” ·         “And then Grans told me she had a secret to tell me: she loved me more than anyone else in the world.”
9. The writing has a conversational, kid-sounding tone.	·         “Me and Christopher were looking for snacks in the kitchen…” ·         “Like, she’d bring Mom some ice chips, and then fart.” ·         “And he was like, ‘No problem!’”
10. The pattern of three	·         “This school was very different. It was smaller. It smelled like a hospital.” ·         “I’d just get mad. Mad when they stared. Mad when they looked away.” ·         “But it’s hard. It’s hard not to sneak a second look. It’s hard to act normal when you see him.” ·         “Horrified. Sickened. Scared.”
11. Participles	·         “What I remember the most from the day Grans died is Mom literally crumpling to the floor in slow, heaving sobs, holding her stomach like someone had just punched her.” ·         “Not just the front rows, but the whole audience suddenly got up on their feet, whooping, hollering, clapping like crazy.”

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Sentence Stalking #7

In Mechanically Inclined, Jeff Anderson teaches sentence stalking, a way to use mentor texts of any length to draw students' attention to an author's craft, the goal being to highlight what is done well rather than to take kids on an error hunt.

What concepts can we teach from the following sentence?

“Paralyzed, my face on fire, I could only look at her, shocked at what I had done (Ida B 212).

Notice the participles at the beginning and end of the sentence. Notice the commas that accompany them.

Play with the syntax. Shuffle the parts of the sentence in a different order. Which one is preferable?

Talk about the imagery of a face on fire. What does that look like?


What other concepts do you see?

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Sentence Stalking #6

 

In Mechanically Inclined, Jeff Anderson teaches sentence stalking, a way to use mentor texts of any length to draw students' attention to an author's craft, the goal being to highlight what is done well rather than to take kids on an error hunt.

What concepts can we teach from the following sentence?

"Then I looked straight at Daddy and said, ‘Can I please be excused now?’ and the words I used might not have been angry, but it was in my voice and flashing out of my eyes” (Ida B 116).

Speak Ida's words out loud. What is the expression on her face? What is the tone in her voice?

Talk about the use of Daddy as a proper noun. When should "daddy" be capitalized? When shouldn't it be?

Notice how to punctuate a question in quotation marks.

Look at the pronoun "it" and talk about what "it" is.


What other concepts do you see?

For more Sentence Stalking, click the label in the sidebar.

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Sentence Stalking #5

 

In Mechanically Inclined, Jeff Anderson teaches sentence stalking, a way to use mentor texts of any length to draw students' attention to an author's craft, the goal being to highlight what is done well rather than to take kids on an error hunt.

What concepts can we teach from the following sentence?

“In the hard-packed dirt of the driveway, after the glaring lights are out and the people have gone home to bed, you will find a veritable treasure of popcorn fragments, frozen custard dribbling, candied apples abandoned by tired children, sugar fluff crystals, salted almonds, popsicles, partially gnawed ice cream cones, and the wooden sticks of lollypops” (Charlotte’s Web 123).

Talk about concrete language.

Strip the sentence to its essence. What is left? Compare that with the original.

Look up the definition of veritable.

Count the commas. Discuss their purpose.

Imitate this sentence with a different topic, maybe a messy bedroom.


What other concepts do you see?

For more Sentence Stalking, click the label in the sidebar.

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Sentence Stalking #4

 

In Mechanically Inclined, Jeff Anderson teaches sentence stalking, a way to use mentor texts of any length to draw students' attention to an author's craft, the goal being to highlight what is done well rather than to take kids on an error hunt.

What concepts can we teach from the following sentence?

“Avery put on clean underwear, clean blue jeans, and a clean shirt (Charlotte’s Web 119).

Teach or review the serial comma (x, x, and x).

Talk about the effect of repeating "clean" three times.

Review parallel structure.


What other concepts do you see?

For more Sentence Stalking, click the label in the sidebar.

Note: This post contains an affiliate link.

Sentence Stalking #3

In Mechanically Inclined, Jeff Anderson teaches sentence stalking , a way to use mentor texts of any length to draw students' attention to an author's craft, the goal being to highlight what is done well rather than to take kids on an error hunt.

What concepts can we teach from the following sentence?

“’Struggle if you must,’ said he, ‘but kindly remember that I’m hiding down here in this crate and I don’t want to be stepped on, or kicked in the face, or pummeled, or crushed in any way, or squashed, or buffeted about, or bruised, or lacerated, or scarred, or biffed’” (Charlotte’s Web 125).


Highlight the verbs in this sentence.  How many are there?  What effect do they have?

Talk about parallel structure.  

Discuss the commas separating each of the verbs.  Are they necessary?

Notice how to punctuate a quote within a quote.

Observe the punctuation when interrupting a quote with "said he."

Talk about the effect of "said he" vs. "he said." 


What other concepts do you see?

For more Sentence Stalking, click the label in the sidebar.

Note: This post contains an affiliate link.

Sentence Stalking #2

 

In Mechanically Inclined, Jeff Anderson teaches sentence stalking, a way to use mentor texts of any length to draw students' attention to an author's craft, the goal being to highlight what is done well rather than to take kids on an error hunt.

What concepts can we teach from the following sentence?

“For one second, before the metal cooled, the inside of his right hand, from wrist to fingertips, was coated with solid silver” (Johnny Tremain 33).           


Talk about prepositional phrases. How many are there? 

Strip the prepositional phrases from the sentence. What is left? What does this tell us about the function of prepositional phrases?

Rearrange the prepositional phrases. Is there a better order, or is Forbes' syntax purposeful?

Discuss the imagery of the sentence.


What other concepts do you see?

For more Sentence Stalking, click the label in the sidebar.

Note: This post contains an affiliate link.

Sentence Stalking #1

 

 In Mechanically Inclined, Jeff Anderson teaches sentence stalking, a way to use mentor texts of any length to draw students' attention to an author's craft, the goal being to highlight what is done well rather than to take kids on an error hunt.

What concepts can we teach from the following sentence?

“A florid woman was flapping a pink feather fan” (Johnny Tremain 75).

Talk about alliteration, the repetition of the initial sound in florid, flapping, feather, and fan.

Notice the adjectives that describe woman (florid) and fan (pink, feather).

Look up the meaning of florid.

Discuss the choice of "was flapping" vs. "flapped."


What other concepts do you see?

For more Sentence Stalking, click the label in the sidebar.

Note: This post contains an affiliate link.