The Green Book by: Jill Paton Walsh (Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction)

The narrator of the story, Pattie, is a young girl whose family has traveled from Earth to a new planet.  They are with many other families and have been chosen to start new lives in a setting that they have no information about.  The families are anxious in the four year journey from Earth to the new planet and become discouraged when they cannot cut down trees or grow food in the same ways.  Everybody is constantly worried about the wheat harvest and whether it will turn out well enough to provide food.  The characters discover candy coming from the trees and enormous birds that are intelligent enough to join in on games but cannot communicate with the humans.  Pattie and her siblings are the first ones to test out the new wheat and make a miraculous discovery…

I would use this book in the classroom to integrate multiple subject areas.  After reading the story, the students can use their language arts and writing skills to respond to the text.  The students would be asked to be creative in coming up with a planet that they would like to travel to with their families and describe it in detail.  They would need to describe the trip from Earth to the new planet and describe the ways in which they obtain food and other necessary resources.  The students could use their imaginations to create a similar plot line based on discovering new life and attempting to find or grow food on the new planet.  I could also ask the students to all get out a blank piece of paper and provide them with one minute to write the beginning of the story before they have to pass their paper to the next person.  They continue on the new story with the introduction their classmate has written until I announce that it is time to switch again.  The stories would turn out to be much more creative that way and it is a fun way to practice writing skills while responding and relating to the text.

AR Book Finder Book Level 5.5