Module 5

Module 5

Kit's Wilderness

Summary 
Kit's family is back where their ancestors have been mining for years.  He meets a boy named John who has a rough life.  They play a game called Death and Kit sees ghosts of boys who died in the mines.  John sees them too and this bonds them together.  Kit is determined to save John from his alcoholic father.  Kit also befriends a girl who tries to protect and warn him of danger.  Kit's grandfather is dying as well but he still gives Kit some life lessons. 

Bibliographic Citation
Almond, David. (1999).  Kit's Wilderness. Delacorte Press: New York

Impression
This was an interesting book with alot of different plot lines in it.  The mysterious ancestor ghost game is a little creepy but does keep you interested.  John Askew is a pretty dark character but you can see why when you learn of his background.  I thought that the bond between the two boys was done really well.  I can not say this was one of my favorites but it did keep me involved enough to get though it.  It was just a little too dark for me. 

Review

Almond, David (2000) Booklist starred Vol. 96, No. 9/10 p860.  Retrieved from Library & Information Science Source 17 Nov. 2013.

Gr. 6-9. Almond, whose Skellig is the Booklist 1999 Top of the List winner for youth fiction, creates a heartbreakingly real world fused with magic realism in this story, set in an English coal-mining town. Thirteen-year-old Kit Watson and his family have returned to Stonygate to care for Kit's recently widowed grandfather. Almost immediately, Kit is enticed by John Askew, also of an old mining family, into a game called Death. Like the other members of Askew's gang, Kit is left alone in an abandoned mine until he sees ghosts of ancestors who died there as boys. Kit's friend Allie tells him that the other kids pretend to see these apparitions, but Kit really does see--and Askew knows it. The boys share a bond. Both are artistic: Kit is a writer; Askew is an artist. And both are sensitive enough to perceive what may not be there. But Kit comes from a strong, loving family, and Askew is the child of an ineffectual mother and a father who's a vicious drunk. Slowly, as Kit hears stories from his grandfather and writes his own, he realizes he has a mission--to save John Askew, body and soul. Almond has set an enormous task for himself. He juggles several plot elements--grandfather's fading mental capacities, Allie's acting aspirations, one of Kit's stories--along with the boys' struggle for redemption. But he succeeds beautifully, knitting dark and light together and suffusing the multilayered plot with an otherworldly glow. This is a long book, and a complex one, but Almond's language is a pleasure to read; and, as with Skellig, the story's ruminations about death and the healing power of love will strike children in unsuspected ways.

Uses
I think this would be a good book to base an activity on embracing the differences in people and not judging by looks or even always actions.  You could make a list of attributes or characteristics and get impressions on them from the students then write about a stereotype they have seen or been subject to. 

Module 5
American Born Chinese

Summary
This is a graphic novel with three stories that overlap each other. One is about the Monkey King that wants to be powerful and be a god but gets punished and becomes humbled, the second is about a Chinese-American student who is in an all white school and has a crush on a girl but gets picked on by his classmates, and the third is about a popular, athletic boy who dreads the visits from his very stereotype acting Chinese cousin. All of the stories are about the problems of racism and they are all brought together at the end to illustrate how this can easily happen.

Bibliographic Citation
Yang, G. L. (2006). American Born Chinese. New York: First Second.

Impression
This was a sad but inspirational book. You can really get a sense of what the lifestyle was like at that time for a sharecropper family. The sad parts of the book like Sounder getting shot or the father and Sounder dying toward the end of the book is offset some by the boy finding strength in the journey and learning to read. This book would be better for middle and high school.

Review

Glantz, Shelley (2007)Library Media Connection; Vol. 25 Issue 4, p65-65, 1/6p Retrived from Literary Reference Center, 17 Nov 2013.

In this graphic novel, three humorous and seemingly unrelated stories keep the reader’s attention until they come together atthe end. The first story concerns a Chinese-American boy trying to fit in. The second is a retelling of the Chinese fable of the monkey king. Those familiar with the anime/manga

Saiyki will immediately recognize the characters of the monk, water sprite, and boar in the Journey to the West. The third story involves a Chinese cousin who visits an American boy each year. The depiction of the cousin is so painfully stereotypical that you feel guilty laughing. In each story, the central character

is unsatisfied with who he is and goes to great lengths to be someone else—with humorous results. The reader might be puzzled as to how the three stories are connected until the conclusion. It’s a nice combination of a fable and contemporary stories to convey the wonderful lesson of accepting one’s culture and identity with pride. A quick read, this title has engaging art, and at times, funny dialogue. There are some mild sexual references. One of my students, an active graphic novel reader, pronouncedit, “Really funny with good characters.”

Recommended.

Uses

This would good to use with a graphic novel display. Examples of several types could be used.

Module 4

Module 4

Number the Stars

Summary
A Jewish family is smuggled out of Denmark into Sweden.  Her name is Annemarie Johansen and she and her family have had to deal with the Nazi occupation for a while.  They even take in another girl and act like she is part of the family so that she will not be taken by the Nazis.  This is the story of a brave girl and what she and her family go through in World War II.  They do make it back home.

Bibliographic Citation
Lowry, L.  (1989).  Number the Stars.   New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. 

Impression
A little bit like the story of Anne Frank.  It gives a pretty good impression of what it was like for the Jewish people during that time.  I did enjoy this book because it was a little bit suspenseful and kept you wanting to find out what would happen next.  I think this book would appeal to upper elementary and middle schoolers. 

Review
Gepson, Lolly.(2004) Booklist  Vol. 100 Issue 21, p1857-1857, 1/8p.  Retieved from Library & Information Science Source 17 Nov. 2013.

Gr. 4–6. It is 1943, and 10-year-old Annemarie lives in Copenhagen under German occupation. Her somewhat normal life is engulfed with terror when Nazis begin rounding up Jews for relocation. When the Germans threaten her best friend, Ellen Rosen, Annemarie must examine whether

she is courageous enough to be a “bodyguard for all of Denmark’s Jews.” Brown reads with precision and empathy as she recreates this horrific time. She is able to express Annemarie’s brashness in the face of her fears and gives credible voice to Annemarie’s feisty little sister, self-controlled parents, and the heroic resistance fighters. She portrays the brutal soldiers with a convincing German accent. A stellar audio version of the 1990 Newbery award winner. —

Uses
This book could be used as a book for a book club discussion by a history class when discussing the Nazis and Jews.  This would be done in the library...teacher or librarian can moderate.


Module 4

Holes

Summary
Stanley is a boy at a juvenille detention facility called Camp Green Lake.  He got there by being convicted of stealing (which he did not do).  He blames it on a curse of a great-great grandfather whose story we get here as well.  Another part of the story is a tale of a woman who hid money somewhere in the Camp Green Lake area.  All the detainees do is dig holes and Stanley figures out that they are looking for something.  There is an escape by Stanley and a friend Zero but they return to find the money.  They do find a suitcase and they get a pardon to keep it. 
 

Citation
Sachar, L. (1998). Holes. New York: Random House

 Impressions

I thought the book was a very well written story.  It has three different stories, two for background, and the story happening at the present.  I have seen the movie but it has been a while.  I liked the relationships between the kids and how they caught on to what they were really doing.  The happy ending made me feel good about the book.  I know that the english dept at my school uses this book in class so that's what made me read it.  It was hard not to try to picture the characters as the movie ones but of course the book is better detailed.  I felt sorry for the students at first but during the book they hold their own and so you start to root for them by the end. 

 

Review
Sutton, Roger. (1998) Horn Book Magazine Vol. 74 Issue 5, p593, 3p. Retrieved from Library & Information Science Source 17 Nov. 2013.

Louis Sachar has written an exceptionally funny, and heart-rending, shaggy dog story of his own. With its breadth and ambition, Holes may surprise a lot of Sachar fans, but it shouldn't. With his Wayside School stories and — this reviewer's favorite — the Marvin Redpost books, Sachar has shown himself a writer of humor and heart, with an instinctive aversion to the expected. Holes is filled with twists in the lane, moments when the action is happily going along only to turn toward somewhere else that you gradually, eventually, sometimes on the last page, realize was the truest destination all along.

The book begins, "There is no lake at Camp Green Lake," and we are immediately led into the mystery at the core of the story: "There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas." We soon learn that there is no camp here either, not really, only a boys' detention facility to which our hero, Stanley Yelnats, is headed. Stanley has been convicted of stealing a pair of shoes donated by baseball great Clyde Livingston to a celebrity auction. The fact that Stanley didn't steal the shoes, that indeed they fell from the sky onto his head, is disbelieved by the judge, and even deemed immaterial by Stanley, who blames the whole misadventure on his "no-good-dirtyrotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather!" — a favorite family mantra. And as the book goes on to show, with great finesse anci a virtuoso's display of circularity in action, Stanley is right. His destiny is as palindromic as his name.

We soon learn about that pig-stealing great-greatgrandfather and the curse that has haunted Stanley's family, even though the hapless eider Yelnats, like Stanley, didn't steal anything, and the curse is more of an ordination, a casting of the die. Stanley's great-grandfather found his place in the pattern when he encountered Kissing Kate Barlow, nee Miss Katherine Barlow, who became a ruthless outlaw of the Wild West when her love for Sam, the Onion Man, became cause for small-town opprobrium — and murder. Miss Barlow's recipe for spiced peaches also plays a large part in the story.

Heck, it all plays a large part in the story. Those peaches show up more than a century after they were canned, and their efficacy remains unchallenged. Just like Sam's onions. Just like the lullaby, sung, with telling variations, by the Yelnats cian:

"If only, if only," the woodpecker sighs, "The bark
 on the tree was as soft as the skies." While the wolf
 waits below, hungry and lonely, Crying to the moo-oo-oon,
 "If only, if only."

As for the title: when Stanley gets to Camp Green Lake, he discovers that every day each boy, each inmate, must dig a hole five feet by five feet by five feet. (Why? Too bad you can't ask Kissing Kate Barlow.) Stanley makes a friend, Zero (nicknamed thus because this is exactly what the world finds him to be), with whom he eventually escapes the camp. These boys have a date with destiny and, trust me, it has everything to do with the pig, Kissing Kate, the lullaby, the peaches, the onions… even the sneakers, Sachar is masterful at bringing his realistic story and tall-tale motifs together, using a simple declarative style —

Stanley Yelnats was given a choice. The judge said, "You may go to jail, or you may go to Camp Green Lake."

Stanley was from a poor family. He had never been to camp before.

— that is all the more poignant, and funny, for its understatement, its willingness to stay out of the way.

We haven't seen a book with this much plot, so suspensefully and expertly deployed, in too long a time. And the ending will make you cheer — for the happiness the Yelnats family finally finds — and cry, for the knowledge of how they lost so much for so long, all in the words of a lullaby. Louis Sachar has long been a great and deserved favorite among children, despite the benign neglect of critics. But Holes is witness to its own theme: what goes around, comes around. Eventually.

 

 

Uses

 Library scavenger hunt.  They must find the Hole that each object is in.  Winners get prizes.