Book Review – Update: The Crossover, by Kwame Alexander

** Contact us if you would like to have one of our engaging mentor text sessions come to your campus! **

Almost a year ago, I reviewed The Crossover with lesson ideas and then began shoving it (sometimes unwillingly) into teachers hands.  It seemed like the golden ticket to reluctant adolescent readers.  Why would they not take this book and share it with their students?  Since then, the book won the Newbery Award.  Validation is sweet.

Now that this book has received an honor, outside of “Jessica Rogers thinks it’s great,” I would like to add a few more ideas and resources.  Don’t forget to share your ideas with us and our readers!

Shape Poetry (Concrete Poetry)

I shared in the first review that students could create shape poetry.  Here are the pages in the book that will help the discussion of shape poetry: 3, 10, 30/31, 36, 59, 94, 149, 181, 221/222.  Concrete poetry works because it’s visual.  When reading the poem, some meaning would be lost if the reader could not see the page.

Choose a page that is an example of concrete poetry and read it aloud to the students without them being able to see the page.  Discuss what they are thinking and visualizing as you read.  Have students make inferences and draw a conclusion based on the reading.  Then provide a visual of the page and reread the poem.

• How do the line and word positioning help interpret the text?
• Was it easier to visualize or did it change your visualization when you were able to see the text?
• Why did the author choose to use concrete poetry on this page?
• Why is the author only choosing certain pages to use concrete poetry?

Visualization

Alexander works with words in ways that make the reader stop, ponder and picture.  This is a great time to teach students about visualizing what they read.  Ask them what pictures come to their mind when they reread certain lines from the book.  Discuss similes, metaphors, personification, the five senses.  With certain lines from the book, you might have to explain figurative and literal meanings and connotation and denotation.  The visuals that are created in the text are intended to live within the reader.  The words paint the picture to enhance the emotions and engagement with the text.  Here are a few examples from the book:

• JB’s a shooter, but I’m sneaky and silky as a snake … (27)
• Time to pay up, Filthy, JB says, laughing and waving the scissors in the air like a flag. My teammates gather around to salute. (38)
• “A cold breeze whistles. Her hair dances to its own song.” (80)
• “He’s on fire, blazing from baseline to baseline.” (147)

Have students write the words at the top of a paper and illustrate their visual –

 

Making Connections

Throughout the novel, Josh provides ten basketball rules.  These rules are running his life on the court and off the court.  The rules provide opportunities for students to discuss the intertextual connections and foreshadowing.  How are these rules connecting within the book?  How do the rules apply to your life?  If the rule doesn’t apply, what is one that does?

Text-to-Text Connections – other books that deal with loss:

• The Fault in our Stars by John Green
• Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie by Jordan Sonnenblick
• We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
• Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan