79 pages • 2 hours read
Jack GantosA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.
“Your Own Story”
In this activity, students will use an experience from their past to create a children’s picture book based on their life.
Gantos’s drive to become an author and garner experiences sets him on a path of self-destruction. After getting out of prison, however, Gantos realizes he had a story all along and begins writing children’s books. Create your own children’s book based on your own life experiences. Then draw connections between your story (or your experience in writing it) and Gantos’s own experiences with writing. Use the points below to develop your story.
Reflect on your story and explain any realizations you came to in writing it that might parallel Gantos’s own realization that stories are experienced in day-to-day life.
Teaching Suggestion: Students may find it beneficial to explore some of Jack Gantos’s children’s stories to generate ideas of how their own childhood experiences could be used as material for writing.
By Jack Gantos