When You Reach Me

By: Rebecca Stead

Winner of the 

2010 John Newbery Medal

Miranda is a 6th grader growing up in New York City with her mother and her best friend, Sal. Throughout the book Miranda gets a series of letters from an anonymous writer who seems to know everything about her, even things that haven’t happened yet. Miranda must write back to this person in order to solve the mystery of who is sending the letters she also find out that she has the capability to save someone life. With all the pressure and stress from the letters Miranda is also finds troubles with her friend Sal who has withdrawn from her. There is a lot going on in the 6^th graders life. Set in 1978-1979 readers get to see what it was like for a child growing up at that time without feeling detached from the novel and the characters.

Publisher: Wendy Lamb Books Random House 

Copyright: 2009 

Reading Level: 3-5^th Lexile: 750L

Suggested delivery: Independent read, Whole group, or small group read.

Vocabulary: omen, latchkey child, lob, scoured, fundamental, obstruct, nags, scoured, appreciate 

 Electronic Resources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/books/review/KidsChronicle-t.html

http://misdelar.wikispaces.com/file/view/When+You+Reach+Me+Student+Guide.pdf This PDF offers great before, during and after reading activities that student’s could do as well as a biography of the author and suggestions on how to connect this book to other areas of curriculum such as social studies. The teachers guide is also included and will be useful for teaching this book to students. (http://misdelar.wikispaces.com/file/view/When+You+Reach+Me+Teacher+Guide.pdf)

http://www.rebeccasteadbooks.com/books.html this is the authors website that gives a list of books she has written along with their descriptions and ways to contact her.

http://youtu.be/4ZTzzR4SToc - Rebecca Stead talking about When You Reach Me.

Activities to increase comprehension:

Before reading:  This book mentions A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle quite often. Have the students read this book before reading When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead might be a good idea to offer some good discussion of how the two books are similar or different. Another thing to do before reading would be to give the students a description of the book and from that have them make predictions about what the book will be about.

During reading: This book is a mystery, one way to have the students feel like detectives and get into the book when they are reading would be to have them write down new predictions that they have as the book goes on. While the students are reading you might want to go over the vocabulary that they come across, this book is set in a different time period then the children are used too and some vocabulary they might be unaware of such as “latchkey child”.

After reading: Now that the students have read the whole book you can have them look at all the predictions that they have made from the beginning to the end and then write a paper talking about how they have changed throughout the book and if any of their predictions were right or close.