America’s favorite novel ever has been named: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. More than four million votes were cast for PBS’s The Great American Read program.
Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a staple of secondary school curricula nationwide. The novel has never been out of print since its initial publication in 1960 and continues to enjoy both critical and popular success worldwide.
To Kill a Mockingbird in the Classroom: Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes, a text from NCTE, examines ways of engaging students as they study Lee’s novel. Included are collaborative learning, discussion, writing, and inquiry-based projects as well as activities related to the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Check out the sample chapter on “Examining Text Structure.”
Christina Torres shares with us “We Shouldn’t Always Feel Comfortable: Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters.”
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus explains to Scout that “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (36). Make this advice more literal by inviting students to imagine spending a day in someone else’s shoes in this writing activity. Students examine a variety of shoes and envision what the owner would look like, such as their appearance, actions, etc. They then write a narrative, telling the story of a day in the shoe owner’s life.
What novel would you have voted as the number one read?