The Stranger in 2nd Grade

...not a real stranger of course! This week, we are reading a fun holiday book called The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg. This book is full of mystery, and requires students to make inferences to figure out who "the stranger" in the story is.

In this story, Farmer Bailey and his family come across a strange man, who appears to have lost his memory. While he is staying with the Bailey family, many peculiar things happen... the stranger never appears to get tired or sweat, his body temperature is very cold, animals seem to come near him, the trees change colors as he walks by, he leaves a frost on the window... can you guess who it is? 2nd graders were not able to guess at first, which was part of the fun!

On the first day, I had students do a Roundtable Kagan structure to come up with questions that they had about The Stranger. Who is he? Why was he here? Why is he so cold? After making this list, students made an inference with their table and made a guess on who they thought The Stranger could be. Students thought he was maybe a magician, Santa Claus, a robot, just to name a few.

On the second day, we reread the book. As we read, we discussed our original theories and decided if they could work or not. We debunked a lot of the original ideas, and started narrowing it down as we read a second time. As we reread this time, we filled out a chart of all the clues we learned from the story.

After this, I allowed students to have one final chance to make a guess who The Stranger was by using Jot Thoughts structure. After much discussion... The Stranger is actually Jack Frost! The best part about this book though? It never actually tells you who The Stranger is... you have to figure it out for yourself.