Novel Guide • Teacher Edition • Grade 7 The Call of the Wild by Jack London Published and Distributed by Amplify. Copyright © 2019 by Amplify Education, Inc. 55 Washington Street., Suite 800, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.amplify.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form, or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written consent of Amplify Education, Inc., except for reprinting and/or classroom uses in conjunction with current licenses for the corresponding Amplify products. Table of Contents Teacher Edition Welcome to Amplify ELA’s Novel Guides 1 Part 1: Introduction 2–3 Part 2: Text Excerpt and Close Reading Activities 4–5 RL.7.4 Step 1: Close Reading Activity 6–7 RL.7.1, RL.7.2, RL.7.3 Step 2: Connected Excerpts to Continue Close Reading 7 RL.7.4 Step 3: Writing Prompt 7 W.7.2, RL.7.4 Part 3: Additional Guiding Questions and Projects Step 4: Guiding Questions to Read the Whole Book 8–9 RL.7.1, RL.7.2, RL.7.3, RL.7.6 Step 5: Extended Discussion Questions 9 SL.7.1 Step 6: Writer’s Craft 10 RL.7.4, RL.7.6 Part 4: Summative Projects Step 7: Writing Prompt 11 W.7.3, W.7.3.D Step 8: Final Project 11 RI.7.1, RI.7.3, RI.7.9, RL.7.1, W.7.2 Step 9: Challenge 12 RI.7.1, RL.7.1. RL.7.9, W.7.1 Step 10: Extra 12–14 RL.7.2, RL.7.4, W.7.3 Step 11: Extended Reading 15 Note: The student worksheets can be found on pages 17–32. Teachers can make copies of these pages to distribute to students. The Call of the Wild • Teacher Welcome to Amplify ELA’s Novel Guides We created a series of Novel Guides to provide you with a flexible resource for the books you most want to teach. Some of the titles are in the digital library while others will need to be accessed through your school, public, or classroom libraries. We selected one strong aspect of each novel and are having students focus on this element as they explore and analyze a key theme. Rather than fully built-out lessons, these guides offer lean, targeted instruction that follows Amplify ELA’s pedagogy as students explore great literature. Each Novel Guide provides activities and questions with sample answers for the Teacher Edition, including: • A complete close reading session, • Discussion questions including the text excerpt • Writing Prompts • Connected excerpts to extend • Exploration of Writer’s Craft reading and skill practice • Role-playing opportunities • Guiding questions and activities to support reading the whole book • Collaborative learning • An introduction to the book and • Social-emotional learning the author discussion questions, Writing Prompts, or activities • Activities that focus on a range of literacy skills • Standards alignment • Project-based learning The diverse selection of books we chose comprises a range of genres from mystery to non-fiction, and themes from social justice to identity and courage. Students explore classics and contemporary award winners, expand their literacy skills, and discover the rewards that come with close reading compelling texts. The guides are designed to be used flexibly and offer suggestions for implementation. All the guides are housed in the Amplify Library as downloadable, printable PDFs. They include student worksheets and instructions for the teacher that will take students through a close reading of a passage all the way to the end of the novel. The Call of the Wild Novel Guide 1 The Call of the Wild • Teacher Part 1 Introduction About the story In The Call of the Wild, Jack London tells the story of Buck, a dog who is kidnapped from his tranquil California home and forced to pull a sled in the Yukon Territory. The harshness of the terrain and the brutality of his human and canine co-travelers force Buck to confront his own wild nature. He begins to hear promptings from deep within himself, promptings that call him to a life long since forgotten. Themes that align with this guide This guide focuses on the words and phrases London uses to describe the visions and promptings Buck receives from his innermost nature. It also offers extended activities that help students make connections to the author’s purpose and the sources and ideas he draws from to develop The Call of the Wild the narrative. by Jack London Amplify Library version About the author Published in 1903 Cover Art: Amplify, Shutterstock Jack London was an American author, born in San Francisco in 1876. As a young man, he joined the Klondike gold rush to northwestern Canada, an experience that would contribute to The Call of the Wild. He lived a life of wandering and adventure, traveling as a migrant and as a sailor. He wrote more than 20 novels, many of them drawing on his experiences. London died when he was just 40 years old. 2 The Call of the Wild Novel Guide The Call of the Wild • Teacher When and how to use the Novel Guide Amplify ELA’s Novel Guides can provide flexible teaching options. They can be used at any point in the year or paired with thematically related core units, before or after teaching the units. Or, if you would like to build out lessons, the guides can be used as the foundation for a more fully developed curriculum based on the titles. The Call of the Wild Novel Guide aligns with the following core unit: 7A: Red Scarf Girl & Narrative Sub-Unit 3, Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution Ji-li Jiang faces conflicts with the adults and peers in her life in the tumult of the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China. The Call of the Wild Novel Guide 3 The Call of the Wild • Teacher Part 2 Text Excerpt and Close Reading Activities Excerpt: The Call of the Wild, Focus standard for Part 2: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.7.4 Chapter 4, paragraphs 26–28 Skill: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they 26 Best of all, perhaps, he loved to lie near the fire, hind legs crouched are used in a text, including under him, fore legs stretched out in front, head raised, and eyes figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the blinking dreamily at the flames. Sometimes he thought of Judge impact of rhymes and other Miller’s big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley, and of the repetitions of sounds (e.g., cement swimming-tank, and Ysabel, the Mexican hairless, and Toots, alliteration) on a specific verse or stanza of a poem or section the Japanese pug; but oftener he remembered the man in the red of a story or drama. sweater, the death of Curly, the great fight with Spitz, and the good things he had eaten or would like to eat. He was not homesick. The Sunland was very dim and distant, and such memories had no power over him. Far more potent were the memories of his heredity that gave things he had never seen before a seeming familiarity; the instincts (which were but the memories of his ancestors become habits) which had lapsed in later days, and still later, in him, quickened and become alive again. 27 Sometimes as he crouched there, blinking dreamily at the flames, it seemed that the flames were of another fire, and that as he crouched by this other fire he saw another and different man from the half-breed cook before him. This other man was shorter of leg and longer of arm, with muscles that were stringy and knotty rather than rounded and swelling. The hair of this man was long and matted, and his head slanted back under it from the eyes. He uttered strange sounds, and seemed very much afraid of the darkness, into which he peered continually, clutching in his hand, which hung midway between knee and foot, a stick with a heavy stone made fast to the end. He was all but naked, a ragged and fire-scorched skin hanging part way down his back, but on his body there was much hair. In some places, across the chest and shoulders and down the outside of the arms and thighs, it was matted into almost a thick fur. He did not stand erect, but with trunk inclined forward from the hips, on legs that bent at the knees. About his body there was a peculiar springiness, or resiliency, almost catlike, and a quick alertness as of one who lived in perpetual fear of things seen and unseen. 4 The Call of the Wild Novel Guide The Call of the Wild • Teacher 28 At other times this hairy man squatted by the fire with head between his legs and slept. On such occasions his elbows were on his knees, his hands clasped above his head as though to shed rain by the hairy arms. And beyond that fire, in the circling darkness, Buck could see many gleaming coals, two by two, always two by two, which he knew to be the eyes of great beasts of prey. And he could hear the crashing of their bodies through the undergrowth, and the noises they made in the night. And dreaming there by the Yukon bank, with lazy eyes blinking at the fire, these sounds and sights of another world would make the hair to rise along his back and stand on end across his shoulders and up his neck, till he whimpered low and suppressedly, or growled softly, and the half-breed cook shouted at him, “Hey, you Buck, wake up!” Whereupon the other world would vanish and the real world come into his eyes, and he would get up and yawn and stretch as though he had been asleep.