1/9/2022 Chapter Book Round-Up: Orphans & Oracles, Oh My!

Chapter Book 1

Title: The Boxcar Children

Author: Gertrude Chandler Warner

Illustrator: L. Kate Deal

Recommended for: Grades 2-6

Basic plot: The Alden children (Henry, Jessie, Violet & Benny) are orphans. Believing their grandfather to be violent & cruel, they strike out on their own to find a place to live. The obvious candidate is an abandoned red boxcar. Move over, Tiny House Nation!

Why I love it: If it weren’t for this & Junie B. Jones, I would never have set foot into a chapter book. The story was just so infectious, I couldn’t resist reading more & more. The children are so brave & tender-hearted. They’re resourceful (watch them cook, clean, sew & improvise better than most adults), tight-knit, & guileless. Whether they are befriending lost dogs or charming the innocent grandfather they’ve got all wrong, reading this book is like stepping into a bygone era, when kids were given time & carte blanche to just go outside & wander & play for hours without accountability or supervision. Who wouldn’t want to set up camp in a big old boxcar? I mean, how cool is that? It’s like perpetual hide-and-go-seek.

Where can you find it? Amazon, eBay, AbeBooks, Thriftbooks, OverDrive (cheapest $0.79 & up, used). There are over 100+ titles in this series, so it’s a surefire thing to find one in a Barnes & Noble.

Extension activity: There’s a lovely personality quiz on the series website that matches you to one of the characters. Also, this website has wonderful outings & suggestions that are well-aligned to the text itself (especially the bakery scene! Yum!): https://blog.sonlight.com/extension-boxcar-children.html

Chapter Book 2

Title: The Lightning Thief

Author: Rick Riordan

Recommended for: Grades 5-8

Basic plot: Weird things have always happened to Percy Jackson. When things go south at school & home, he finds himself at Camp Half Blood, where he learns the truth about his father, his friends & his destiny. If you like Greek mythology, epic quests & sarcastic commentary, this is the book for you.

Why I love it: Mythological retellings are usually a dime a dozen, but this series is made fresh & vivid by the author’s dedication to modernization & wit. Percy is easy to root for, but more importantly, he’s believable. He doesn’t try to be a hero & he certainly doesn’t try to fit in. All he wants is to eat blue candy at Montauk with his Mom. We rarely see mama’s boys in middle school literature, so it’s definitely something I was pleasantly surprised by.

Also, the book is chock full of geography. I love that the author so meticulously tied monsters to landmarks, because it made me get out a map & trace the routes taken. My students loved when I put pictures of each attraction mentioned on the board, because it helped them better visualize it.

For adaptations, there’s a graphic novel of the book, a movie, & apparently Disney+ has a series in the works, but I genuinely think the best medium is the audio, as narrated by Jesse Bernstein.

Finally, there are little details that really shine here – such as Poseidon wearing Hawaiian shirts or Medusa operating a statuary – that add depth & flare to the writing.

*A note about the content – Percy’s stepfather, Gabe, is verbally abusive. Not foul language, exactly, but a lot of degradation & general snottiness. While I think this adds a certain gravitas to Percy’s quandary, you may want to screen the first few chapters to make sure it is appropriate for your young reader. It is on par with the way Cinderella’s stepmother treated her*

Where can you find it? Amazon, eBay, AbeBooks, Thriftbooks, OverDrive (cheapest $0.35 & up, used). I am willing to bet my lunch money that you’ll be able to find a copy at Barnes & Noble.

Extension activity: I do not exaggerate when I say there are thousands of resources, not just on the author’s personal website, but on Scholastic, TeachersPayTeachers, & homeschooling sites solely dedicated to The Lightning Thief. Whether it’s a HyperDoc, escape room, or a novel study pamphlet, you really just need to choose what’s right for you.

I suggest beginning with a book tasting! I gave my students a variety of Greek foods to set the mood – pita with hummus & tzatziki; pomegranate juice (aka the nectar of the gods); spanakopita; baklava; & blue candy (in my case, saltwater taffy), of course. We accompanied this with Greek God & Goddess B.I.N.G.O. to get them familiar with the Big 12.

After finishing the novel, I had my students do several projects to assess their comprehension & delve deeper. The first was to research & present to the class a PPT created about one of the gods/goddesses of Olympus of their choice. On the last slide, students had to rate whether or not the author stayed true to the basic mythos. This required them to critically think & synthesize large swathes of information.

The second project was a full-on room transformation, where we actually created Tartarus in one corner using black trash bags & flame fabric, & we created a Temple of Poseidon in another corner using paper towel rolls as columns. We hung up Greek pottery that we made out of Dixie plates, we fashioned shields out of tinfoil & we displayed Wanted posters of the fugitives mentioned in the story (did I mention that when students misbehaved in class, I sent them to Tartarus instead of writing a referral? It was very effective).

I encouraged my students to create dioramas of the settings, or to make artwork of some of the mythical beasts mentioned in the novel. I received a Lego Parthenon, a clay-sculpted hydra, Camp Half Blood in MineCraft, pomegranate cupcakes, a giant glass minotaur, & a CareBear chimera (don’t ask). One student even made a Monopoly board game about The Lightning Thief, complete with player pieces! Their ingenuity was truly working overtime. I’ve included some pictures here, just so you see the full scope of an untrammeled imagination. I wish I still taught 6th grade so I could teach this book again. I miss it!

Thanks for tuning in! Keep the pages turning until we meet again.

Love,

Sash