Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt is a wonderful book to choose for your next 6th grade novel study or to utilize with intervention-level 7th and 8th grade readers. Your students will be on the edge of their seats waiting to see what happens to Winnie Foster and her adventures after encountering the Tuck family!
This is an excellent novel for character, plot, and setting analysis in middle school. I have taught Tuck Everlasting in my classroom several times. All of the lesson plans and novel study activities featured here are included in my Tuck Everlasting novel study. This PDF download features over 50 pages of daily lesson plans, reading comprehension questions, context clue worksheets, and journal prompts.
Novel Study Ideas and Activities
I use a similar lesson plan structure for all of the novels we read together in class. I lead off each day with a discussion around the assigned reading selection. For my favorite chapters, I highlight a couple pages to read aloud before beginning our discussion.
My standard pace for novel studies includes starting each day reviewing the setting of our reading selection, which in this case is in the heat of the summer in a rural area. This helps students connect right from the start with their experiences on hot days. Class discussions like this help students hear how their peers interpret and connect to the story.
Vocabulary and Word Work
Instead of handing out a list of vocabulary words from the novel to memorize, I like to utilize context clue worksheets that require them to go back into the text and decipher what a word means. The ability to use context clues is an important skill that they need to practice for state testing. My Tuck Everlasting novel unit includes 5 context clue worksheets with about 40 different words.
Character Analysis
Because Winnie and Tuck have had much different life experiences, I like to focus some activities on studying their character perspectives. Character study is important to help our students unlock their awareness of empathy and perspective so that they may become more fluent readers.
The image above shows a couple of my standard character analysis worksheets. The goal is to have students think about the story from the perspective of the main characters and how they are different from each other.
More Ideas for Tuck Everlasting
In addition to the novel study activities I highlighted above, my novel study unit features all of the essential reading comprehension components as well as some other great activities. Here is the full list…
- Chapter by Chapter Lesson Plans
- Chapter by Chapter Reader Response Questions
- Character Analysis Worksheet
- Figurative Language Activity
- Reflection Journal Prompts
- Character Companions: End of Novel Activity
- Teacher Answer Key
Hopefully you found a few ideas here that will help you read this book with your class. Check out the following links for more examples of novel study activities I use with my middle school students…
