Lesson 07 — Ch. 7 'The Shadow Maker'
Lesson context
- No action required this lesson — held units are appendix/assessment materials consumed downstream or held inert.
Spark · 5 min
- Student names what they used to think — about a character, event, or idea
- Student names what they think now
- Student names what made the shift happen — the specific chapter moment, line, or reveal
Guided Reading · 12–15 min
- What does Shoilee offer Mud if he stays on Nothing Atoll? 81 — "You can have everything you want to eat and no work to do, and we can be the best of friends, and you can live three lifetimes."
- What three dangers does Shoilee warn Mud about when describing the shock-shade? 82 — "the shockshade is potent, but it is impossible to procure. It is deep in the jungle, it only rises from the jungle floor at midnight, and it is guarded by a terrible snapping beast."
- Why does Mud almost accept Shoilee's paradise offer before he snaps back to his mission? 82 — "He began to fall under the profound spell of the idea. He would like to live three times as long, and the snacks here were delicious. He began thinking of life without a care, and for a moment the sentence research on Sentence Island, and the responsibilities that he had there, and the hard work of everyone taking care of everyone—all that began to fade in his mind"
- What does Shoilee's warning about the snapping beast reveal about her feelings toward Mud's team? 85 — "It is nothing at all. It is a shadow. It is terrible. I tremble for you."
The Workshop · 15–18 min
This unit introduces the stanza as a poem's structural section — like a room is part of a house. Students encounter quatrains, couplets, triplets, quintets, and the ballad stanza through Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 and Robert Burns's 'A Red, Red Rose,' building toward recognition that stanza forms repeat across poems and that poets arrange every element deliberately.
Application: Identify the stanza form in Burns's 'A Red, Red Rose' (ballad stanza) and mark where lines one and three are iambic tetrameter and lines two and four are iambic trimeter.
Extension: Find one other poem from the unit (or one you know) and name its stanza form — couplet, triplet, quatrain, or ballad. Explain how you identified it.
Application: Compare the quatrain stanzas in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 to the ballad stanzas in Burns's poem — what's the same about how they divide the poem into sections, and what's different about their meter or rhyme?
Extension: Pick two stanza forms from the unit (e.g., couplet vs. quatrain) and describe what kind of poem each form might suit best — a short thought or a longer story.
Application: Write one ballad stanza (four lines, abcb rhyme, with lines one and three in iambic tetrameter and lines two and four in iambic trimeter) about any subject you choose.
Extension: Write a second ballad stanza that continues the first, creating a two-stanza ballad poem. Try to keep the meter and rhyme scheme consistent across both stanzas.
Student-Formed Conclusion · 7 min
- Student names what they used to think — about a character, event, or idea
- Student names what they think now
- Student names the specific moment from today (or this phase) that prompted the shift
Wrap-Up & Preview · 5 min
Workshop recap: Students identified stanza forms in Shakespeare and Burns, compared quatrains to ballad stanzas, and composed their own ballad stanzas in iambic meter.
Next lesson preview: Next chapter: Mud faces the snapping beast that is nothing at all — the shock-shade mission reaches its climax.