Skink—No Surrender

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Book Cover: Skink’s Next Adventure”

After reading about Skink and his deep connection to Florida’s natural environment, students will create book covers to demonstrate their understanding of the book’s characterization of Skink and how this characterization conveys messages about the book’s setting.

Now that you have finished Skink—No Surrender, you have a good understanding of both Skink’s character and his connection to Florida. Skink is a character who appears repeatedly in Carl Hiaasen’s books, and Florida is the main setting for many of Hiaasen’s stories. In this activity, you will imagine a new adventure for Skink that also occurs in Florida. You will create a cover for this imaginary book and then explain how your book cover demonstrates that you understand Skink’s character and his connection to the natural environment of Florida.

Create a Book Cover

• Look at the front and back covers of several books. What information do their images and text convey to a potential reader? What techniques do they use to try to persuade people to read the book?
• Create a front cover for your book, with a title and image that catch the reader’s attention and make the reader curious about the book.
• Create a back cover for your book, with a description of the story that will intrigue a reader and make them want to open up the book and start reading.

Write a Justification of Your Choices

• Write a paragraph that explains how the text and images on your book cover (front and back) demonstrate your understanding of Skink’s character.
• Write a paragraph that explains how the text and images on your book cover (front and back) demonstrate your understanding of the message that Skink’s character conveys about Florida’s natural environment.

Teaching Suggestion: If your students will not have access to physical copies of several different books to examine for ideas, you may wish to choose an online site where they can examine book covers that are age-appropriate. Students may enjoy brainstorming story ideas in small groups or with partners before they begin working on this assignment—and of course, they can easily complete the entire assignment working with a group or partner, if you so choose. Students can create their book covers on the computer or on paper. They may enjoy seeing one another’s finished products, and if your classes are especially motivated by competition, you might tell them that they can vote for the imaginary Skink adventure they would most like to read. Students who are ready for a challenge can be asked to write a page or two as a “sample” of their imagined text and submit this along with their book cover and justification.

 Differentiation Suggestion: Students with attentional and executive function issues may benefit from completing this assignment in distinct stages with clear timelines for completion—brainstorming a potential story, creating a cover, and then justifying their work. As they work on the final phase of the assignment, some students will want to go back and make changes to their book covers to better reflect their understanding of Hiaasen’s book—this revision process might be delineated as a fourth stage with its own timeline. Students with visual impairments can describe the images that they would include on their books’ covers—they may need individual support to clarify the techniques and goals of visual elements typically included on a book’s cover. Alternatively, you might simply allow these students to skip the requirement to include a front-cover image or replace the image requirement with a brief audio blurb for the book they create.