Strategies
How do I plan to achieve the goals outlined above? My students will receive a reading schedule for reading Kindness Goes Unpunished. The unit should take about five weeks to read. The reading will be done at home. In my experience, ordinarily too many students would not do the reading homework. But I hope that the interest in following the vivid characters and the challenge in trying to solve the crime will keep virtually everyone on track. Frequent pop quizzes will be an added stimulus for still-recalcitrant readers. Students will have received a packet at the beginning of the unit containing guide questions (Appendix A), research topics (Appendix B), mystery morphology template (Appendix C), and character analysis sheets (Appendix D),
The guide questions will serve to keep students focused on the content of the novel, as well as reveal the writer's craft to them. Why, for example, do you think the author had Cady tell her father to bring his gun so that she, her boyfriend Devon Conliffe, and her father can go together to a shooting range? Students will hopefully see that this request will make it seem reasonable to the reader for Walt to bring his gun, when otherwise he might normally be expected to leave his weapon at home while on vacation. The guide questions will be due according to the timing listed on the reading schedule.
Students will use the map to plot the action as it goes around our town. Students will hone their spatial-directional skills as the class follows the plot around the city. It should be exhilarating to read about various locations throughout the city: "Hey! I know where that place is!" Or, "You can't see the city skyline from there." The class will also take virtual field trips to city landmarks to help students get more involved in the setting of the story. The class will, as well, Google earth and zero in on neighborhoods where the story takes us. And finally there will be a large class map by which the whole class can see at a glance the settings for the events in the story.
The packet will also contain graphic organizers. There will be a plot diagram, created to be used especially with mystery stories (Fry) (Appendix C). By using this template students will learn what is the usual progression in a mystery story, and will be able to more easily organize in their own minds the plot of Kindness Goes Unpunished as the story develops. There will also be a character analysis chart (Appendix D) whereby the student can describe the characters - but not only describe the characters, but be able to tell (with page number) whence the information comes. He will be able to answer such questions as: What does the character look like? What is his personality? Whence comes this information? From the narrator? From another character? From the character's actions? From the reactions of other characters? All of these questions can be answered on the organizer so that the student has a clear image of each character and a grasp of how the writer gets these bits of information to the reader. As part of the packet, I'll include a blank sheet of paper on which I'll ask students to write down at least five situations that they found humorous and tell why they thought they were funny.
An exercise parallel to the reading and discussion of the novel will be the giving of regular reports to the class by students. These reports will be on many different subjects alluded to in the mystery. They will enrich the reading of the novel for everyone. Students will be assigned to give the reports more or less in sync with the mystery, so that the report will coincide with its being mentioned in the mystery. See Appendix E for a more complete list of topics. Here is just a sampling: the Basques, Wyoming, "Brier Rose", "Sleeping Beauty", Cheyenne Indians, the Thunderbird, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Old City, Elfreth's Alley, the Painted Bride, the Italian Market, the Phillies, the Eagles the Lenape Indians, and so on. Students will gain expertise in writing and presenting reports and the experience of reading the mystery will be richer for everyone. The assignment for "Brier Rose" and "Sleeping Beauty" would be the memorizing of and the telling of each story to the class. The Cheyenne Indians assignment and the Lenape Indians assignment would be special cases. Four students would receive assignments on each culture in order to present a fairly complete picture of each culture: history, place, significant events and people, and their situation today. Each student would pick a topic from a hat. Each topic would have a due date. Two or three students per day would present their findings parallel to the reading of the mystery. There would be leeway for trading topics so that a student could feel somewhat at ease with the subject matter and due date. I'll check all of the materials in the packets for completeness and accuracy weekly.
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