Brian's Winter

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.

“Brian’s Social Media”

In this activity, students will demonstrate their understanding of Brian’s perspective and of the importance of setting in Brian’s Winter by creating social-media-style posts from Brian’s perspective.

Imagine that Brian has a smartphone with him during his time in the wilderness and that he is taking pictures of this setting to post when he is finally somewhere with a cell signal. When he returns home, what are three scenes he might share on social media? How might he caption these scenes to convey why they are significant to him? In this activity, you will create three social-media-style posts from Brian’s perspective.

Choose Three Photos

• Your photos should represent Brian’s natural environment, not the things he added himself, like his shelter.
• Each photo should show a clearly identifiable location where something important to Brian happened. (Choose locations that appear in the story.)

Create Three Social-Media-Style Posts

• Your posts should use both images and text to convey why the locations are important to Brian: What happened in this spot, and what was significant about it?
• You can create these posts using whatever tools you are comfortable with, but if you would like to work from a template, here is one good place to find some.

Share and Comment

• Post your work for your classmates to see.
• Comment on all three pieces posted by two of your classmates (six total comments) as if you are a friend of Brian’s and are commenting on his social media posts.

Teaching Suggestion: Students will need Internet access in order to gather the photographs for this assignment. If this is impractical, you might allow students to draw the pictures by hand instead of sourcing them online. If they do not have access to an online space for posting their work, you might ask them to create physical copies and post them in the classroom. In this case, they might add comments to one another’s work by placing sticky notes below each picture.

You might wish to give students some advance guidance about their comments on one another’s work: What kind of substance do you want in these comments, and how should they make sure that everyone gets a roughly equal number of comments on their work? If your students are ready for an additional challenge, you might ask them to discuss how different selections of locations and events would impact Brian’s audience’s perceptions of his adventure and how Brian might manipulate his selections in order to convey different messages.

Differentiation Suggestion: Students with anxiety, perfectionism, and related conditions may be overwhelmed when asked to choose three locations from among the dozens featured in the text. English language learners, students with dyslexia, and those with attentional and executive function differences may also find it unreasonably challenging to sort through the entire text to choose locations. A prepared list of six or so possible locations to choose from may be helpful to these students. Visually impaired students may not be able to complete this activity as written; as an alternative, you might ask these students to write a brief description of each scene and then explain, from Brian’s perspective, why they are important.