Reading

1. Reading for Meaning (Making Inferences) - Chapter Prompts: Students are asked to respond to the potential meaning of chapter events based on prior knowledge.
2. Understanding Form and Style (Critical Literacy) - Character Voices: Students are asked to respond to the same question from the perspective of different novel characters.
3. Reading With Fluency (Reading Familiar & Unfamiliar Words) - Choral Reading: Students read aloud position of the text in small groups and collectively identify diction in development.

Writing:

1. Developing and Organizing Content (Organizing Ideas) - Narrative Essay: Students detail a personal anecdote and argue how that led them to an epiphany about their self image.
2. Using Knowledge of Form and Style (Form) Teleplay Adaptation: Students write a short dialogue exchange for television.
3. Applying Knowledge of Conventions (Sentence Craft and Fluency) - Peer Editing: Student use the PAR method for identifying and suggesting revisions

Oral Communication

1. Listening to Understand (Active Listening Strategies) - Small Group Comment Circle: Students express thoughts on chapter events and group members engage in active and reflective listening to value member voice.
2. Speaking to Communicate (Clarity and Coherence). Elevator Pitch: Students have 60 seconds to pitch a film adaptation of the novel

Media

1. Understanding Media Texts (Evaluating Texts) Film Comparison: Students use Venn Diagram to compare a film of personal significance to them with the novel
2. Understanding Media Forms, Conventions, and Techniques (Form) - Scene Previsualization: Students storyboard a scene that had personal significance to them.
3. Creating Media Texts (Producing Media Texts) - Animoto Adaptation - Students use the Animoto software suite to present an argument about the most meaningful ideas derived from the text.

Yunior tires of Oscar living his life in philosophical sci-fi fantasy.

“Wondering aloud, If we were orcs, wouldn’t we, at a racial level, imagine ourselves to look like elves?”

Yunior contemplates the authenticity of cross cultural curses.

“The only answer I can give you is the least satisfying: you'll have to decide for yourself. What's certain is that nothing’s certain. We are trawling in silences here.”

Lola decides to exert her free will over her uncontrollable situation.

“That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.”

Oscar's anguish and isolation at Don Basco Tech in Patterson NJ.

“For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars?—Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants.”