How to Eat Fried Worms: Unit Overview

This unit focuses on using the characters, themes, events and language of Thomas Rockwell's How to Eat Fried Worms in order to consider how literature can describe character types, imagery, and feelings that allow readers to connect the text to their own life, and to those who have lived a different culture than the one being described in the text (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.9). Lessons from this unit allow students to be creative and display multiple intelligences, yet remain rooted in comprehension, metacognition, broadening vocabulary, proper spelling techniques, and close reading (4.1, 4.4). Lessons will allow students to compare text to similar themes and experiences in their own lives and those from different cultures and locations from the characters in the book, and present them in multiple styles of expression (4.9, 4.7, 4.6, 4.5, 4.3). This unit focuses on promoting good character and morals so that students might inspire change in their community and within themselves, all the while understanding that one bad act does not make a villain. A student's ultimate goal is to relate to the text so that they may improve their ability to communicate and understand life situations, and to understand that they, too, can become an everyday hero, and that the choices they make in the long run determine if it characterizes them as a hero or a villain.