Island of the Blue Dolphins

Our new essential question is: How can reading literature help us to understand a culture? I picked Island of the Blue Dolphins because evidence of Karena's Indian culture is prevalent throughout the novel.

On this poster you can see that we are adding evidence from the novel of various customs/beliefs of the island people.

One writing assignment we worked on had to do with choices the main character has to make. Karena's brother does not make it to the ship that has come to rescue the native people. Karena has an important choice to make. Should she stay on the boat with her sister or jump off to stay with her young brother? Here is the worksheet we used for discussion surrounding this suspenseful part of the story.

Another writing assignment we worked on had to do with the fact that the author, Scott O'Dell, does not let us know how Karena is feeling about many of the events in her life. The novel is told from Karena's point of view but we rarely get a clear idea of how she is doing emotionally. We had to do some close reading of the text in order to infer this character's feelings. The last few pictures showed how we analyzed the text and made our thinking visible in the margins  as we read. Christine