What do you students think about a topic before reading? Do their ideas change after reading? Learn about how anticipation guides can support your students’ changing opinions and ideas.
How far would you go to stand up for what you think is right? Would you be willing to defy a King, who also happens to be your uncle? These are the decisions Antigone faces when King Creon orders that Antigone’s brothers go unburied after a bloody civil war. Should she risk death or imprisonment to honor the dead and her god or blindly follow King Creon’s decree, leaving her brothers’ bodies to rot in the sun? As a companion text, try a Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This text reflects the theme of civil disobedience: standing up against injustice through peaceful demonstration.
Gunnar Umlaut says he only has six months to live. So eighth-grader Anthony “Antsy” Bonano does the only thing he can think of to help-he gives Gunnar a month of his own life. This symbolic gesture is soon copied by everyone at school, but will it make a difference, especially if Gunnar isn’t telling the truth?
A story told entirely from the point of view of Jason, an autistic boy who is a creative-writing whiz and deft explainer of literary devices, but markedly at a loss in social interactions with “neurotypicals” both at school and at home. He is most comfortable in an online writing forum called Storyboard, where his stories kindle an e-mail-based friendship with a girl. The author describes Jason’s attempts to interpret body language and social expectations, and ultimately how Jason moves through his failures and triumphs with the same depth of courage and confusion of any boy his age.
Classics, Fairy Tales, Folktales and Myths, Romance
Age Level:
YA
Greek goddesses experience the highs and lows of romance and heartbreak in dramatic ways that teens can relate to. This book relates the stories from the goddesses’ points of view.
After her sophomore year in high school, Apple Starkington, who grew up feeling like she didn’t fit in with her White father and stepmother, spends the summer at the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation getting to know her Native family members for the first time.
Chu-Mong, legendary leader of ancient Korea, suddenly appears — in the flesh! — in 12-year old Kevin’s bedroom in his contemporary Dorcester, New York, home. Humor and tension build as ancient and modern come together in order to get Chu-Mong back to his own time and to take his rightful place in history.
