Who is the Stranger?

This week we took a little break from our normal reading routine. I wanted to share

with students one of my favorite books, The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg.

In this book Farmer Bailey is driving home and he hits a man. The man seems

confused and lost his memory.  The farmer brings him home to rest during the

fall season. During his stay we uncover many subtle clues about who the stranger is.

I first read the story aloud to the students. At the end they were asking,

“Who was the stranger?” and “Why did he bring him home?” I proceed to tell

them that those are some good questions and I’m sure we have a lot more

of unanswered questions. This lead me to our WALT  (We are learning to) for

the day: How can our questions help us to understand what we read? I sent them

back to their seats to think about questions they still had about the story.

We used the jot thoughts structure to list as many questions as they can about

the book. After giving them some time I called on students to read their questions

and post it on the anchor chart. If others had the same questions they

posted it as well. I was impressed with some of the questions they came up with.

The next day, we continued to try to put the pieces together to identify the

mysterious stranger. As I reread the story we took a deeper look at the stranger.

We used a graphic organizer to list the many traits of the stranger. I first model how

to identify the clues. Then I had them tell me when to stop when they thought we

came across a clue. By the end of the story the students were picking out the clues.

                        

After we listened and filled in the organizer the students went back to their seats

to discuss. They used a round robin structure to say who they thought the

stranger and gave reasons why.

Lastly, we all came back together to reflect on our findings. Students shared

their ideas of who they thought the stranger was. There was a lot of deep discussions

of agreeing and disagreeing with their ideas that the stranger was a vet, a farmer, artist

and even a ghost. Through their thinking they eventually decided that the Stranger must be…

Jack Frost!  

However, this is just our theory! The stranger is never revealed and it’s up to you to infer!