Book Scavenger

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 Scavenger Game”

After reading about the book-based puzzles in Book Scavenger, students create their own puzzle games based on details of Bertman’s novel.

You’ve just been reading about a game that relies on books—and now it’s your turn to create a game based on a book. In this case, the book will be Book Scavenger. Your goal is to create a puzzle using clues based on details from Bertman’s story.

• Create ten clues that give hints about specific locations around your school. Each clue should refer to a person, an event, or some other detail from Book Scavenger. For instance, you might write “Your next clue is where Quisling writes down the cipher he intercepts” to direct someone to look at a blackboard (or whiteboard). Number each of your clues in order.
• Your final clue will lead to a location that holds a “prize.” Create a drawing of what this prize will be. You should choose an item from Book Scavenger that is important to one of the characters to use as your prize. On the back of your drawing, give evidence from the novel to demonstrate why this prize is something important to one of the characters in the book.
• Create a map of your school, showing where you would leave your clues. Write clue numbers on the map to indicate where each specific clue would be located. Clue #1 would just be given to the player at the start of the game, so your clue locations on your map will begin with #2. Your final location should be marked “Prize.”
• When you have finished working on this activity, you will turn in:
• A map with ten locations marked on it. Nine locations will be marked #2 through #10, and the final location will be marked “Prize.”
• Ten clues based on details from Book Scavenger, with clue #1 leading to location #2, and so on, until the 10th clue leads to the location of the prize.
•  A drawing of your prize with an explanation on the back that gives evidence that this prize is something important to one of the characters in Book Scavenger.

Teaching Suggestion: This activity can easily be completed individually, with a partner, or in small groups. If time permits and your teaching circumstances allow for it, you might ask each individual, set of partners, or group to team up with another to play one another’s games. You can add more complexity to the activity by requiring students to write their clues in a simple cipher. It may be beneficial to have preprinted maps of your school available for students to populate with their clue locations, as drawing the map of the school will be time-consuming and a potential obstacle for students with spatial cognition deficits.

Differentiation Suggestion: This assignment has a component that depends on students’ memory of text and another that requires spatial cognition. Students with reading comprehension issues may struggle to remember enough details from the book to complete this task quickly, and students whose spatial thinking abilities are impaired may have trouble imagining how the text can be applied to specific locations in their own school. For these students, completing the assignment in a small group or with a partner will likely be a sufficient accommodation.

Students with executive function and attentional issues may be overwhelmed by the idea of scouring an entire text for details to use in this activity. It may be helpful to offer them a list of the best chapters to use—most of the book’s chapters do not, after all, take place at Emily’s school, and so only a few of the chapters will be directly applicable to this activity. These students, too, will likely benefit from being allowed to work with a partner or group.