Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What do you know about September 11, 2001? What about American Airlines Flight 587?

Teaching Suggestion: Encourage students to think critically about what they may have heard about Flight AA587 and provide them with resources for learning more about it.

• The Atlantic published “Remembering America’s Second-Deadliest Plane Crash” in 2011, in which victims’ relatives remember the disaster.
• NBC News published an interview with Elizabeth Acevedo in which she talks about why she focuses on flight AA587 in Clap When You Land.

2. What is a Coming-of-Age story? What are some examples of such stories?

Teaching Suggestion: Students may think first about classic coming-of-age stories, so use this opportunity to introduce a different type of coming-of-age story.

• This YouTube video, “Characteristics of Coming-of-Age Stories,” goes over the basics of this type of story.
• LitHub published a list of fifty classic coming-of-age novels that can provide a useful reference.

Short Activity

Novels-in-verse tell book-length stories through a poetic form. Think of a memory and consider how you can tell that story as a novel-in-verse.