The Hoboken Chicken Emergency Activities

The Hoboken Chicken Emergency by Daniel and Jill Pinkwater is a fun Thanksgiving book that your students might have seen as a TV special. It makes a terrific read aloud for elementary through middle school, with grades 3-4 as the epicenter, if you will, of enjoyment.

Arthur Bobowicz is sent out to get his family’s Thanksgiving turkey, but ends up with a live, 266 pound chicken bred by a mad scientist called Professor Mazzocchi. It’s the sort of thing that might happen to anyone, but it leads to complications. Arthur keeps the chicken as a pet, names her Henrietta, and trains her, as you can see in the video clip above. When Henrietta proves to be an inconvenient pet and has to be returned to Professor Mazzocchi, she ends up loose on the streets, scaring people in scenes reminiscent of Godzilla or King Kong. Arthur accepts the situation until the town hires a chicken hunter who sets a trap for Henrietta. When the trap fails, Professor Mazzocchi reenters the story and kicks off a “Love Henrietta” campaign to tame the chicken and endear her to the town. The campaign is successful, and by Christmas Henrietta is back with Arthur as his pet.

Read the story. There are 14 chapters, but some are very short, so this could be a daily after-lunch reading for two weeks. As you enjoy the story, try out some of these activities and discussion questions:

• Arthur lives in an urban neighborhood with lots of immigrants and some interesting shops. Compare Arthur’s shopping experience to your students’ experiences of grocery shopping. Do they visit special markets like the Indian spice shop Arthur visits? If you’re studying immigration as part of your Thanksgiving lessons, this is a nice connection.
• Hoboken is a real town. Visit Hoboken’s website to get a sense of the place.
• The family ends up eating meatloaf for Thanksgiving dinner, since Arthur wasn’t able to acquire a turkey. As it happens, the family doesn’t really like turkey, but they always have it for Thanksgiving because it’s traditional. Discuss students’ Thanksgiving traditions, and check out our Food Traditions lesson plans for related activities.
• In chapter 4, Professor Mazzocchi explains how he breeds rectangular goldfish. Use the process to practice writing step by step directions or making flowcharts.
• Professor Mazzocchi also explains that “Fish do not like to think about things they don’t understand.” Is this true of people? We’ve found that some people like ti and others say it makes their heads feel as though they’re about to explode. This is a nice question for a reflective essay.
• In chapter 6, Arthur nearly catches Henrietta, but he is in a place where he is forbidden to go, and his father finds him. Arthur doesn’t ask his father to help him get Henrietta, for fear of getting into trouble and because he’s already sure that his father won’t help. Discuss other choices Aurthur might have made.
• Arthur has to go on a family visit during the Thanksgiving break, and when he comes back, the situation has gone from being a tough break for Henrietta to being an emergency for the town of Hoboken. Discuss with students what constitutes an emergency, and what plans and systems are in place for emergencies in your classroom, school, and town.
• Henrietta is one 266-pound chicken standing six feet tall, but soon news reports are announcing that witnesses have seen lots of 1,o0o pound chickens standing 15 feet tall. Two things are going on here. First, rumors grow as they spread. Second, people in general are terrible at estimating sizes. Experiment with this by choosing a pet or stuffed animal and measuring its height and weight accurately. Take a photo and print out copies for each student. Have students interview five people each and get their estimates of the size of the creature. Graph your results.
• This book was written in 1977. The rumor about the chicken spreads by radio in chapter 7. How would it spread today? Have students create a script for the medium they choose: perhaps a succession of Tweets or Facebook updates or TV news flashes.
• The town hires a Chicken Hunter whose web address is badfowl.com. Have students use information from the book to create a homepage for www.badfowl.com, the website of Anthony DePalma, Chicken Hunter. Students can do this on paper or in your class’s graphics program, but it would also be an excellent opportunity to learn some new tech skills by building a webpage.  Read our series on A Better Classroom Website in a Week for tips.
• Arthur tries to find Henrietta himself over the Thanksgiving break without getting help. The police and the chicken hunter try to track her down and capture her, without success. Then the whole town gets involved in the “Love Henrietta” campaign, with positive results. Have students identify the steps of the campaign, and discuss why it worked. Have students brainstorm other possible solutions to the problem.

The Time Machine Lesson Plans

The idea of traveling through time has fascinated people for centuries. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells continues to be a popular example of science fiction and fantasy dealing with this possibility.You can read it online.

In this book, a time traveler from 1985 goes into the very distant future and finds what initially seems to be a utopia, the land of the Eloi. The disappearance of his time machine leads The Time Traveler to discover the Morlocks, whose work makes the ease and pleasure of life possible for the Eloi. In another twist, The Time Traveler learns that the Eloi are not the masters of the Morlock slaves, but the livestock on which they feed.

Before reading, discuss with students other time travel fiction they might have experienced, such as books from Time Warp Trio or Magic Tree House series or the movie Back to the Future. Recall the methods for time travel used in any books or movies students know about. Time machines are fairly rare in recent speculative fiction.

 

Online Resources

• A Penguin Factsheet for the book
• James Van Pelt’s quizzes and discussion questions
• Crayola suggests creating a timeline with sidewalk chalk and traveling through time with movement and discussion.
• Build a time machine from recyclables.
• Any serious discussion of time travel has to include the theory of relativity and  Einstein’s space traveling twins (I think it’s a law). Introduce the concept with a Shockwave game.
• Check out retrofuture, the  ideas people in the past had about our present, which was their future.

Science

• Time travel is a serious possibility to some physicists. Check the idea out on YouTube:

• Time Magazine has a more in-depth video on time travel narrated by comedian Brian Malow, with film clips. Review it before you show it to your class — it may not be appropriate for your classroom.
• An article on the subject from The Daily Mail will clarify some of the scientific points and paradoxes for older students.
• The future world visited by The Time Traveler has two kinds of humanoids, which have evolved from the upper and lower classes. The theory of evolution was fairly new when this book was written. If you study evolution in your science classes, discuss the processes which could lead to two distinct species of humans.
• A theme in the book which is related to the theory of evolution is the degeneration of humanity and of the world. The theory of evolution doesn’t actually hold that organisms keep getting better and better or that they get worse, though people sometimes talk about it in those terms. The Time Traveler thinks that a lack of danger and hardship has caused people to become weak. Discuss and have students write a response to this idea.

Social Studies

• This is the perfect time for the classic dinner party question: If you could have a dinner party with eight guests from any time in the past, whom would you invite? Have groups of students create such a dinner party, with each student researching one of the guests. Groups can write up scripts for a dinner table conversation among the guests and present it to the class.
• Another way to bring drama and research into the study is to have each student study a period in history which they find intriguing, and then report to the class as time travelers who have just returned from a visit.
• The Time Traveler visits a society in which advancing technology has made life so easy that there is no longer any advantage to being smart or hard working. Since the book was written in 1895, technology has advanced significantly, and our lives are in many ways easier. We haven’t quit working, though. Have students discuss and then write about the consequences of increasingly advanced technology and easier lives.
• Wells sees serious consequences from the gap between the haves and the have nots which was very evident in his day. Have things improved? See an article from the New York Times on global wealth distribution and a chart-rich discussion of U.S. wealth inequality from a University of California sociologist. Set aside plenty of time to analyze and understand the charts — it’s a great visual literacy lesson as well as a good way to apply math skills. Once students have digested the data, discuss whether this is a problem, as Wells believed.
• The Time Traveler muses on adaptation and evolution, thinking of how in 1985 physical courage was becoming less important than it previously had been. Family feeling, he though, would become unimportant in the future, and he figured he was seeing the end of intelligence and creativity in the Eloi. Compare the culture of Victorian England, our modern time, and the Eloi to determine whether there is a continuum, as The Time Traveler expected.

Lesson Plans for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde was written by Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island and many more great stories, as well as some of the most popular children’s poetry.

Dr. Henry Jekyll is a good, well-respected man. Mr. Hyde is a monster — in the opening scenes of the book we learn that he trampled a little girl with complete unconcern, and later he commits a murder. And yet Mr. Hyde is actually Dr. Jekyll. Jekyll has learned to make a potion that allows his worse side to become a separate creature — Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll continues to be a good doctor, but as Mr. Hyde he can do all the wicked things he wants to do. As Mr. Hyde’s behavior becomes worse, Dr. Jekyll tries to stop turning himself into Hyde. However, in the end he changes into Mr. Hyde without even taking the potion. Instead, he must take the antidote to return to his life as Dr. Jekyll. He is unable to get the special ingredients for the antidote and unable to stop turning into Mr. Hyde, so he writes out a confession of all that has happened, leaves poison ready on the table for Mr. Hyde, and waits. His friends find Mr. Hyde dead and read Dr. Jekyll’s confession with astonishment — and that is the end of the book.

There are so many good online resources for this classic that we wouldn’t take the time to create quizzes or handouts ourselves — scroll down for the links. However, we do have some cross-curricular hands-on ideas for you.

English

• The tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde begins with Mr. Utterson, who is usually left out of movies and retellings of the story, but whose search for the truth about his friend Dr. Jekyll takes up most of the book. The story of Frankenstein begins with Captain Walton, again just a bystander. This device of having an unimportant character lead gently into the story was popular in the 19th century. Ask students to look for other examples of this literary device, and then to think of other literary devices. For example, novels now sometimes begin with a series of emails, while books in the 20th century and earlier sometimes began with letters. Have students identify a literary device and illustrate it, creating a class bulletin board.
• Dr. Jekyll believed, as he says in Chapter 3, that he could control Mr. Hyde and be rid of him at any time. He was wrong: Mr. Hyde became more powerful than Dr. Jekyll and destroyed him. This is another similarity with Frankenstein, but it could also be said of drug use or of a bad habit like gossiping or even of unwise friendships. Ask students to write a fictional or factual account of someone’s struggle with something they thought they could easily give up — but could not.
• Use Venn diagrams to compare and contrast Frankenstein with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
• Read Write Think has a lesson plan with nice printables that has students create a storyboard for a transformation scene showing Dr. Jekyll becoming Mr. Hyde. I’ve had very good results with using video and other multimedia in writing classes. If you haven’t tried it, this is a well-organized lesson that will make an easy starting point.

Science

• Dr. Jekyll decides not to share his method of creating the potion that divided his good self from his evil self. This is probably because such a potion is impossible. Nowadays, we tend to think of potions in terms of magic potions created by Harry Potter and his classmates, but Stevenson was writing at a time when potions, tonics, and tinctures were taken seriously. Have students research salts (a major part of Jekyll’s potion) to determine what the potion might have included. Ask students to create recipes, giving points for plausibility and creativity, as well as for evidence of research.
• Stevenson suffered from tuberculosis and was treated with a drug derived from ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus. Read an article on Stevenson’s experience. The writer argues that Stevenson used his experiences with this drug to develop the idea of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. See whether students agree, and then challenge them to research the effect of drugs on personality and behavior. Does their new knowledge change their opinions?
• It has been suggested that Dr. Jekyll represents the left hemisphere of the brain, which is rational and rule-governed, while Mr. Hyde is a right brain creation,with the disorderliness and originality of the right hemisphere. Does this imply that the left brain is good and the right brain evil? Have students learn more about the right and left hemispheres (resources are linked at our Brains Lesson Plans page) and draw infographics showing the characteristics that might give someone this idea.

Online resources

• Glencoe has an excellent teaching unit for the book with a lot of historical background.
• Penguin also has a teaching guide with comprehension questions for each chapter.
• SparkNotes has summaries, discussion questions, and a quiz.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Lesson Plans

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a fun ghost story by early American writer Washington Irving. Read the whole story online with photos at the website of the Sleepy Hollow cemetery.   The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad includes Disney’s terrific cartoon version, voiced by Bing Crosby. It makes a great choice for Hallowe’en party entertainment, or to follow up a reading of the story.

In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, schoolmaster Ichabod Crane seeks the hand of a wealthy landowner’s daughter. His rival, Brom Bones, is a local hero, a rough sportsman with a gang of friends who join him in bullying Ichabod Crane. At the end of a lavish harvest festival, Ichabod takes the chance of speaking to the girl he admires, is rejected, and leaves the party in a bad mood. He is chased by a headless horseman carrying a Jack o’ Lantern in place of a head, and disappears forever.

Washington Irving was also the author of Rip Van Winkle and an important contributor to the American image of Santa Claus.

Lesson plans and resources available online:

• Edsitement’s Sleepy Hollow lesson plan asks the question, “How did Washington Irving write a story that still captures audiences hundreds of years later?”
• Identify subjects and predicates from the book’s sentences in an online grammar quiz.
• A PDF file from Theater IV has a variety of worksheets and activity pages.
• A lengthy history-oriented unit plan from Core Knowledge includes information about auctions, the Revolutionary War, and a broad range of related topics.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a wonderful read aloud, filled with  marvelous descriptions and humor. Once you’ve read it, choose from these cross-curricular connections to extend the learning and the fun.

English

• The important characters of this story are described in lively language, with lots of detail. Katrina van Tassel, the girl whom both Ichabod and Brom are courting, is described only in terms of her appearance, with a passage later about her parents suggesting that she might be spoiled. Have students flesh out the character of Katrina in a character sketch.
• Many people have made plays from this story — your class can do it, too! Write and stage the play for your school, or film it for your class website.
• While this story is accessible to younger readers, the vocabulary can really be challenging. Collect words from the story in a pocket chart or on chart paper and see how many new ones you can learn while you’re reading the story.

Social Studies

• Sleepy Hollow is a real place, and the character of the place is important to the story. Irving says that the people of Sleepy Hollow are inclined to see ghosts, and says of visitors to the area, ” However wide awake they may have been before they entered that sleepy region, they are sure, in a little time, to inhale the witching influence of the air, and begin to grow imaginative, to dream dreams, and see apparitions.” There is no Google Earth Tour online yet for this story, so here’s your chance! Check out our Google Earth writing assignment for how to make a tour.
• The life of a teacher during Colonial times (and after, in many areas) was difficult. Ichabod Crane, like most teachers, earned very little and was given a place to live by parents of his students. Things were different for students, too — not least because of the use of corporal punishment, which is described in the story. Use a Venn diagram to compare school in Irving’s day to your modern school.
• Sleepy Hollow had lots of local ghost stories, the most exciting one being the story of the Headless Horseman. Have students research local ghost stories. If there are no local ghost stories where you live, discuss why that should be. Is Irving right in thinking that some places encourage superstitious attitudes? Is your town too new to have developed any ghost stories? This is a good opportunity for surveys and oral history projects.

Frankenstein Lesson Plans

 

Frankenstein is the story of a man, Victor Frankenstein, and a monster, who is never given a name. It was written by Mary Shelley, who began creating the tale when she was just 19. Read it online at Literature.org.

Having read and enjoyed the book, choose from the cross-curriculum connections below to explore the issues in it more deeply.

English

• Advanced classrooms will appreciate the Signet teacher’s guide. It’s a very through discussion of the book as literature, referencing the Romantic period, literary influences in the work, and scientific and philosophical questions raised by the book. There are suggestions for using blogs and chat rooms, too.
• The novel is written from several different points of view. Ask students to rewrite a scene from the point of view of a different character.
• There are a lot of places in this book! See the Google Earth tour linked below to get to know them. Then discuss: why is this so far-reaching a story? Does it improve the book? Is it necessary?

Social Studies

• The story of Frankenstein begins in St. Petersburg, Russia, and continues in Switzerland, France, Germany, England, Scotland, and a whole bunch of other places. Download a Google Earth Tour created by Dana Huff to explore and keep track of the travels of the characters. Huff recommends setting the tour up on a Smartboard, but you could also cue up sections on a classroom projector  or set the tour up in  your computer center. The tour is long (almost nine minutes if you don’t stop to explore) and there are lots of things to explore along the way, so you might want to use it in parts or let students access it as you read, and then watch it together after finishing the book, in order to get a sense of the whole sweep of the novel.
• Frankenstein is a place in the Rheinland. Visit with Google maps or see a photo of the castle. Castle Frankenstein was the home of an eccentric alchemist, and Victor Frankenstein studies alchemy. There were rumors that the owner of Castle Frankenstein performed experiments with cadavers, as did Vitor Frankenstein. some say that Mary Shelley was inspired to write her book by the events at Castle Frankenstein. Have students research the place and find text references in the book to support their claim — either yes, the book was inspired by the place and its history, or no, it was not.

Art

• A fun lesson plan encourages students to create their own paper monster.
• Frankenstein may be better known to your students as a movie than as a book. After reading the book, watch a scene from the film and compare the two. What changes are required when a story is taken from one medium and put into another?
• Frankenstein’s monster loved music. People who are angry, unhappy, and out of control often find that music helps them feel calmer and more in control. Have students choose some music for the monster, play it for the class, and explain why they chose it.

Science

• Frankenstein’s love of science begins with a love of nature and a desire to learn how the world works. Many of your students may have felt the same love and desire. Have students research some heroes of science and discover how this feeling has affected the lives of real people.
• Research alchemy. What were the goals of the alchemists, and how does alchemy differ from chemistry?
• Frankenstein is fascinated by the power of electricity when he sees lightning strike a tree. Just how powerful is lightning? Read about it at National Geographic. 
• Captain Walton is engaged on polar exploration. Frankenstein was published in 1818. Create a timeline of polar exploration (or add to your classroom timeline) and place Mary Shelley’s book at the right point. You might like to use Time’s Vintage Polar Expedition Photos collection to illustrate the timeline.
• One of the big ideas in this book is that there are some experiments that shouldn’t be undertaken. Many people today believe this, and there is much controversy about research into subjects like human cloning and stem cell therapies. Experimentation on animals is another controversial topic, as is genetic modification of food-producing plants. Have students collect news stories about scientific controversies and create a bulletin board.

Character Education

• Frankenstein’s monster yearned for love and companionship.  His determination to ruin Victor Frankenstein’s life stemmed from Frankenstein’s refusal to love him or to create another monster for him to love. If Frankenstein had treated the monster differently, or made a bride for him as he asked, might things have turned out differently? Have students write an alternate ending to the story.
• A related question is this: was Victor Frankenstein responsible for the monster in the way that a parent is responsible for a child? Plan a class debate on the question.
• Victor Frankenstein tells his story to Captain Walton in order to warn him against ambition, even the ambition to advance scientific knowledge. Challenge students to consider whether the story of Frankenstein and his monster is about ambition, or hubris, and to write an essay supporting their decision with specific references from the text.

The Sea King’s Daughter

The Sea King’s Daughter is a lesser-known fairy tale from a Russian ballad. In the story, a young musician descends to the home of the Sea King and plays for a wild party — which, he learns, sets the seas raging and endangers the ships above. He marries the Sea King’s daughter, but doesn’t live happily ever after. His mother in law tells him that if he kisses his bride, he will never return to his home on land, so the musician resists the mermaid’s charms and wakes in his own bed. The story does have a happy ending, since the musician marries a new bride and has children and lives happily ever after, but he does sometimes think of the mermaid. He even thinks he sometimes sees her yearning sadly after him.

Aaron Shepard’s  The Sea King’s Daughter: A Russian Legend is a fine picture book version. Hear the author pronouncing the names at the link, so you can read it aloud with confidence. You might also like Shepard’s reader’s theater script for this story.

Art

• Enjoy a couple of illustrations from Aaron Shepard’s retelling of this story:
• Sadko
• The Sea King
• The illustrator is Gennady Spirin. The links above are PDF files, and could be printed out for use in your classroom.
• Have students illustrate the story themselves, spending some time researching sea creatures so they can draw them accurately.
• Make mermaid puppets, with patterns and cut outs from Phee McFaddle or Marilyn Scott Waters. Students might prefer to design their own!

English

• Compare this story with that of The Little Mermaid. The idea of having to choose between the sea and the land and the sad yearning of the mermaid are similarities, but there are many differences.
• You might also like to compare this story with the tale of The Selkie Wife. The story is available in a printable version with activities in The Arctic Triptych, or read Mara Freeman’s retelling. 
• Having examined some love stories involving sea creatures and land creatures, ask students to write their own. You can read another version at Storybird. Students might like to proofread it for the author, and also to create their own Storybird collaborative stories.

Social Studies

• This is a Russian story — see part of a puppet show version in Russian below. Sur la Lune has a longer version called Sadko  from Old Peter’s Russian Tales by Arthur Ransome. The story is also the basis of Rimsky-Korsokov’s opera Sadko. Given that this is clearly a popular Russian story, why might it be so little known in the United States, compared with other Russian stories such as Peter and the Wolf?

• Storynory has another version of the story of Sadko, complete with the sound of Sadko’s instrument, the gusli. This instrument is reminiscent of the harp, the zither, or the dulcimer. Have students research these instruments and compare them.
• Learn about Russia. Here are some great online resources:
• National Geographic Kids Russia
• A PDF about Peter the Great, from the wonderful Time Warp Trio
• A Core Knowledge lesson on Russia for 5th grade
• A pattern for a felt matryoshka (nesting) doll would also make a great bulletin board in paper. Zakka Life has a template and instructions for a matryoshka card which we think would make a terrific shape book. Have students cut it from construction paper and write facts about Russia as they learn them.
• Make some ponchiki, Russian doughnuts, if you’re brave. Get help from the lunch ladies or use a closed electric fryer and make sure kids don’t get near the hot oil.
• Compare mermaid stories from different countries.

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