The best way to analyze a piece of literature is to ask questions about the characters, plot, and theme. Encourage your learners to stump the teacher with the most difficult questions they can create using Bloom's Taxonomy and various question prompts.

Concepts

speak, laurie halse anderson, asking questions, book analysis, character analysis, reading comprehension strategies

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Additional Tags

english language arts

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Instructional Ideas

• Have kids come up with questions in partners or groups
• Assign the activity for homework, and have kids exchange their work to answer each others' questions
• Base your novel unit (and other reading units) on the literary analysis strategies of Bloom's Taxonomy

Classroom Considerations

• Instructions are very detailed and more complicated than they need to be; you don't need to follow the scripted format of the lesson to make the activity work
• One section of the lesson references the skills that your learners should have, including independently questioning the text and discussing their viewpoints

Pros

• Applicable to any text or piece of literature
• Provides a very helpful reference page for question prompts based on Bloom's Taxonomy

Cons

• None

Common Core

RL.7.1 RL.8.1 RL.9-10.1