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.

“Your Own Story”

In this activity, students will use an experience from their past to create a children’s picture book based on their life.

Gantos’s drive to become an author and garner experiences sets him on a path of self-destruction. After getting out of prison, however, Gantos realizes he had a story all along and begins writing children’s books. Create your own children’s book based on your own life experiences. Then draw connections between your story (or your experience in writing it) and Gantos’s own experiences with writing. Use the points below to develop your story.

• Think of a childhood experience as the basis for your story idea.
• Use a structure like a plot diagram to help you pinpoint the major parts of the story.
• Write your story with illustrations to appeal to a young audience.
• Share your story with peers, explaining how it is connected to your own experience.

Reflect on your story and explain any realizations you came to in writing it that might parallel Gantos’s own realization that stories are experienced in day-to-day life.

Teaching Suggestion: Students may find it beneficial to explore some of Jack Gantos’s children’s stories to generate ideas of how their own childhood experiences could be used as material for writing.