Roland Smith’s Peak amazed me.
At first glance, it’s an easy read – a suspenseful survival story great for older middle-grade readers who can handle stories that include death and danger.
If you look deeper, though, it’s much more than that.
I challenged my students in advance to find the twist in the story – to read carefully and look beyond the obvious meaning of the words to see what the author was carefully implying underneath. One questioned a related issue, but nobody found it! I didn’t expect them to, as this is very well written – but we were able to have a great discussion about the ways that an author can use foreshadowing and clues to add layers of meaning to a story.
After that, it seemed fitting to look more closely at the connections between the elements that Smith included. We used a set of hexagons I had created in advance for this project, and we worked with them a few different ways. First, I challenged the students to connect as many of the hexagons as they could. They did this in an interesting way, as they seemed to think that all of the hexagons needed to be completely surrounded by other hexagons. This makes the process much more challenging than it needs to be!
(New to hexagonal thinking? The idea is that students connect the hexagons by laying them out and touching the sides to other hexagons with words that relate in the story. For example, they might put two hexagons next to each other with character names, and then explain that those characters were best friends and helped each other solve a problem in the story. Any touching sides represent a connection in the story, so students must look beyond surface, physical connections to find similarities and complexities.)
After that, I asked them to explain several of the connections they had made with their hexagons. They did so, and then to challenge them further, I asked them to connect their hexagons in new ways. This made them pause and think about it before beginning and taking a new strategy. One really great aspect of this lesson was that they were talking through a variety of connections and what different characters, settings, and themes meant to them personally and to the story as they worked to connect hexagons.
After they connected many of the hexagons this time, I asked them to find a quote or line from the story that supported a connection that they had made. I love how they immediately dug into the story to find evidence of the correlations they were seeing!
We spent nearly a whole day working with Peak as a book club, and as a family, we’ve been studying Mount Everest, Nepal, and mountain climbing for a month! There are many rich threads to pull to extract meaning from this story, and our whole family joined in the fun. This has been a really fun unit. If you’re looking for more book club-based or unit-based activities for Peak, stay tuned! They’re coming!
I have really enjoyed the hexagonal activities we’ve used with this book study, and I know that we’ll be using these often in the future. Because they’re such a great way of helping students dig into a story, I wanted to share them with you! You’ll find printable hexagons in two different sizes, as well as two pre-reading activities and five analysis activities, along with printable tracking sheets, in this product. If you’re studying Peak, give it a try!
Looking for other creative and fun educational resources? Check out my TpT store here!
What are your students reading this month?
