Crabbe

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.

“Crabbe’s Wilderness Camp”

After reading about what Crabbe learns from his adventures--about himself, life, and the wilderness--students demonstrate their understanding of this character’s values by creating a brochure for a wilderness camp run by Crabbe.

Imagine that Crabbe enjoys his new job at the wilderness camp so much that he eventually decides to open his own wilderness camp for troubled teens. For this activity, you will make a brochure to advertise Crabbe’s camp.

Part One: Gathering Your Ideas

• Think of a name for the camp that conveys a moral value or life lesson that Crabbe thinks is important.
• Decide where the camp is located, what its goals are, and what activities it offers in order to achieve these goals. Your choices should reflect the values that Crabbe learns during his adventures and the activities that he engages in when he is learning about survival from Mary. You do not have to replicate these exactly, but your choices should be consistent with the ideas conveyed in Bell’s book.

Part Two: Creating Your Brochure

• Choose a layout for your brochure: where will you put the camp name, photos or illustrations of the camp’s location and amenities, and descriptions of the activities and the camp’s objectives?
• Find or create the illustrations you need. Remember that if you borrow images from an online source, you will need to provide citations.
• Polish your work by making sure that the fonts and colors you have chosen, the language you have used, and the ideas you are conveying are all working together to create a persuasive advertisement for the kind of camp that Crabbe would approve of.

Teaching Suggestion: Students will consider both the outcomes of Crabbe’s adventures and the causal link between these values and his experiences. It may be beneficial to guide students’ attention to the values and ideas Crabbe holds at the end of the book, and ask them to think about what Crabbe would say are important lessons to promote these ideas and values. You might even consider holding a discussion about these points before students begin work. This activity can be accomplished more quickly and used to promote thoughtful debate among students by allowing students to work with a partner or a small group. It can be made more challenging by requiring students to provide quotes from the novel to back up the choices they make for the camp’s goals and activities.

Differentiation Suggestion: Students with attentional and executive function issues may benefit from having the activity’s bulleted points presented to them one at a time, with clear guidelines about how long each bulleted point should take to accomplish. Because the activity requires searching a large amount of text for ideas, these students—and those who struggle with reading in general—may also benefit from either working with a partner (or small group) or being offered a clear list of items they should specifically search for, such as “What are 3 activities that Mary creates for Crabbe to learn from, and what does each teach him?”