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| This is dull stuff for teachers, who have a
high tolerance for dull stuff! However, if you have the guts to go on, you're
welcome to use anything you find here in book reports, author research projects, etc.
Remember…put it in your own words!
Note: Though My Life Among the Aliens, Club
Earth, A Year With Butch and Spike
and The Hero of Ticonderoga are no longer
easily available for purchase, we are leaving the teaching material for them here at the
website for a while longer because the books are still being used for classroom read
alouds and for student reading groups. They are available through many school and local
libraries. |
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The only reason to analyze literature is to better understand and, therefore,
enjoy what we're reading. Right? Am I right? So it's important to make the introduction of
basic literary elements, as they're often called, enjoyable or kids will miss the point
and think they're being punished. Using My Life Among The Aliens,
A Year With Butch And Spike, or Club Earth in your classroom is a fun way to illustrate the
concepts you're trying to teach.
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A third grade boy once asked me how I could say I write fiction if I really gave
my son a birthday party with an Olympic theme and then used the party in My Life Among The Aliens. Excellent question. Fiction
writers take something from their own lives (an experience, a feeling, whatever) and
combine it with some other idea they picked up somewhere to create a third thing…a
story.
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History
Using an historical figure (or an event or a place) as a case study to help
explain such things as religious and philosophical movements and issues of a particular
period is known as micro-history. Micro-history helps make dry subjects like, say,
religion and philosophy, less theoretical. Religion, philosophy, politics, and all the
other things students hate about studying history, begin to make more sense when we can
see how real people were influenced by them. The Hero
of Ticonderoga can enable teachers to use Ethan
Allen as a case study to explain some of the things that were going on during the
Eighteenth Century.
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This should probably go under some title such as "Teaching Reading,"
but…yawn. Eventually, I hope I'll have more of this kind of info, and we can put it
under the title "Fun Stuff."
First off, this is how the whole Alien Food thing started. A
fourth grade girl in our local school had to do some sort of book presentation for her
class. So, being a smart, clever girl she chose My Life
Among the Aliens as her book. As part of her presentation, she brought in
food that is mentioned in the book. And she had a lot to choose from.
In the very first chapter the aliens and kids eat hot dogs and popcorn. They're
not allowed to eat gum, but it is mentioned. The birthday party chapter features pizza and
watermelon. Bran muffins turn up in the book, as do mystery cookies. And, of course, in
the very last chapter you have what I always refer to as "snowballs"-prepackaged
cakes covered with marshmallow and coconut.
Now according to the mother of the girl who originally did this, the teacher was
not terribly impressed. I, however, was. I thought it was a great idea for a special event
to encourage reading in a classroom or for a special presentation such as this girl needed
to do.
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