Lesson Plans
I’ve created two high school level lesson plans, one for discussion of the novel and one that looks at a handful of Angel Island poems.
Bridge Across the Sky: The Characters
Small groups are assigned to represent characters from the novel and are asked interview questions, some of which can be answered directly from the text of the novel and others which involve a more imaginative engagement with the material. The focus can be on telling the difference between those two types of questions and on appropriately grounding “In the Book” answers in actual textual evidence.
The Angel Island Poems
Students, in small groups or as a whole class, are assigned poems recovered from the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station and asked to find clues about the experiences of the detainees who wrote them.