When thinking about teaching the novel The Giver to students in a classroom of my own, I found that I could go in many directions due the novel’s plot and characters.  I chose to place major emphasis on the structure of the community, and how everything is under strict control.  For my lesson plan, I want my students to focus on the idea of having no war, fear, or pain within a community, but at the same time having no freedom of choice.  Everyone has a place in society, but they do not get to chose it.  I want my students to delve deep into that idea and think about if that would be a good or bad idea to enforce within a group of people.  Students will need to think about whether or not it would it possible to do, and would they personally benefit from it.

In looking for lesson plans to give me useful ideas, I came across a pre-reading activity where I would have my students create their own “perfect” community, in which they would “give it a name, a system of government, a physical description, and an account of how its people spend their days,” (http://www.theliterarylink.com/giver_lessons.html).  The class would have a discussion on how their community would develop and constantly make changes over time.  Each student would decide what roles history and memories of painful events would play in the growth of their community.  They would also have to think about what would have to be added to our own society in order to make it perfect and if anything that we value or take for granted would have to be sacrificed.  As reading of the novel progresses, I would discuss with my students how the communities they made compare to the community in The Giver.  I would ask students to look at the similarities and differences, and at which community they think would have the most success in real life.

            For a Language Arts interdisciplinary connection, I found a lesson plan idea that would discuss with my students the ambiguous ending of the novel from the informative website of http://www.theliterarylink.com/giver_lessons.html. Students would understand that the ending of The Giver can be interpreted in two different ways; either Jonas is remembering his Christmas memory as he and Gabriel fall into a coma in the snow or that Jonas really does hear music and see the warm house where people are waiting to greet him.  I thought the lesson plan I found had a thought-provoking writing lesson for my students to do, “After discussing the role of ambiguity in writing, have students craft short stories that end on an ambiguous note. Discuss some in class, noting the writers’ clues for such an ending,” http://www.theliterarylink.com/giver_lessons.html.

Through the same website, I also found an interdisciplinary connection with science to The Giver.  It refers to the part in the book where Jonas throws an apple back and forth and notices it changes in an uncommon way.  It marks the beginning of his ability to see color, specifically the color red.  Based on that part of the text, I would “divide the class into groups and have them research and report on the following subjects: the nature of color and of the spectrum, how the human eye perceives color, what causes color blindness, what causes the body to react to any stimulus. Is it possible to train the human eye so that it does not perceive color?” (http://www.theliterarylink.com/giver_lessons.html).