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The Julian Chapter: A Wonder Story by  R. J. Palacio

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Wonder (2017 Movie) Precept Discussion Video – R.J. Palacio

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‘Wonder’ Author R. J. Palacio: ‘It’s Ultimately A Story About Kindness’ | TODAY

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A kid with facial abnormalities is about to go to a new school, but how can he convince his new classmates he's just an ordinary kid with an extraordinary face? Author R.J. Palacio explores the world of bullies and finds kindness in her debut novel "Wonder."

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If you were a middle-schooler today, you almost certainly would read by R.J. Palacio, a tear-jerker of a book about a ten-year-old boy born with severe facial differences starting his first year of public school, in your English class. Wonder is a veritable middle-grade fiction phenomenon, right up there with Harry Potter. Published in 2012, Wonder is still the top seller in the juvenile fiction segment, has sold over five million copies, and has been published in 45 languages. On Friday, the film adaptation of Wonder, starring Jacob Tremblay as the protagonist Auggie Pullman, will arrive in movie theaters.

Considering the fact the Wonder is now a staple on school curricula, used in nation-wide anti-bullying campaigns, and has inspired a movement with its own catchphrase ("Choose Kind"), Wonder is quite the remarkable debut novel. Prior to writing Wonder, Palacio had worked as an art director and book jacket designer for twenty years. She'd always wanted to write a novel. In August 2007, Palacio finally found the story she needed to write - and it stemmed from shock and disappointment at her own unkind reaction to seeing a young girl with severe craniofacial differences.

Palacio had been at an ice cream store with her two sons, and sat near a child with an appearance similar to her main character, Auggie's. At the sight of the girl, Palacio's three-year-old son started crying. The author, trying to protect the girl's feelings, panicked and fled the store.

"I got up from the bench as though a bee had stung me, flipped the stroller around, and called my older son, who was coming out of the store with chocolate shakes. The [milkshakes] went flying, and my son is going, 'Mum, why are we leaving so quickly?' and I heard the girl's mum say, in the calmest voice possible, 'Okay guys, I think it's time to go.' It was horrible, just horrible. My heart broke for this woman and for this girl, for whom this must happen a million times each day," Palacio said in an interview with

Driving back home to Brooklyn, Palacio examined her family's reaction to the girl over and over again. "What I should have done is simply turned to the little girl and started up a conversation and shown my kids that there was nothing to be afraid of. But instead what I ended up doing was leaving the scene so quickly that I missed that opportunity to turn the situation into a great teaching moment for my kids. And that got me thinking a lot about what it must be like to ... have to face a world every day that doesn't know how to face you back," she told .

Then, whether through kismet or coincidence, the song "Wonder" by Natalie Merchant, sung from the perspective of a physically handicapped person, began playing on the radio. From this maelstrom of guilt, missed opportunity, and kismet, Palacio began writing Wonder.

'Things just collided in my mind," Palacio told The Telegraph. 'The first line came to me, and the whole premise of the novel. The book wrote itself."

She began Wonder that evening, and finished writing a year and a half later. Palacio feels she's come full circle from the inciting incident back in 2007. "There's a certain act of atonement here, and the fact that maybe I'm helping this little girl, without her knowing, in some way because of Wonder - really, there's a nice little irony that is pretty special for me," she said to .

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The Chance Encounter That Inspired Wonder

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If you were a middle-schooler today, you almost certainly would read by R.J. Palacio, a tear-jerker of a book about a ten-year-old boy born with severe facial differences starting his first year of public school, in your English class. Wonder is a veritable middle-grade fiction phenomenon, right up there with Harry Potter.

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Teach Core Literature Standards with Wonder

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Teach Core Literature Standards with Wonder

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| | Filed Under: Read Alouds, Reading

The summer of 2014, I read Wonder by R.J. Palacio and fell in love. I immediately knew I wanted this to be my first read aloud of the year. Not only are the messages and themes in this book fabulous for children today, but the book literally allows you to teach all the Common Core Literature Standards with this book! Seriously....Read on to find out how.

This post contains an Amazon affiliate link if you decide you want to purchase the book mentioned in this post.

Inferences can be made throughout this book. This is a great book for really digging in deep to a character's feelings, thoughts, and motivations.

This book is full of themes. The best part about this book, in my opinion, is that the life lessons truly resonate with the students. They don't have to think about the future or situations not typical to their lives. They are able to connect with the themes in this book, which makes it that much more
powerful. Here are some example themes:

Believe in yourself.

You are stronger than you think.

Family is important.

Don't judge a book by its cover.

There are some great opportunities for authentic comparing and contrasting throughout this book. Since the book is told through multiple characters' points of view, the reader gets a unique look into different character's motivations and feelings. Here are some good comparing questions to ask:

How does Via's reaction to people looking at August differ from August's reaction?

Compare and contrast Julian's family with August's family.

Compare and contrast Jack Will and August's friendship before and after Halloween.

The book is full of strong word choice that add to the style and build the reader's vocabulary. The students will be so engaged as the story unfolds that their minds will automatically use context clues to define words they come across. The figurative language is definitely there, too. An example I loved is when Via says she let the secret that she was her grandmother's favorite "cover me like a blanket."

One of the unique things about this book is the song lyrics, quotes, and poems that come before a character point of view change. This allows the reader to compare how the overall book is written (prose) versus some of the other excerpts included. Also, Via performs in a play in one of the major scenes of this book. This can seamlessly allow you to transition to the differences between prose and drama.

As I mentioned before, the book is written in different sections with different characters voicing their distinct perspectives. Some of the same scenes are even retold from a different character's perspective. My students mastered point of view/perspective and how it influences a story early on this year, and I attribute it to this book.

The graphic on the cover of the book can invite a lively discussion to practice this standard. The students could also be invited to redesign a cover graphic and explain how their graphic matches and adds to the meaning of the text. There are also graphics on the page introducing a character point of view change. August's graphic changes from section to section. The students could analyze these graphics and their changes.

Another thing I love about this book is that there is a "sequel" short story titled "Julian's Chapter." Julian is the resident "bad guy" and his point of view is never pursued in Wonder. However this short story provides valuable insight into his motivations, thoughts, and feelings. With similar themes and topics, this works perfectly for a lesson comparing and contrasting two books in the same genre.

Written a level U, this is a good example of a 5th grade beginning of the year complex text.

Have I convinced you to read the book yet? 😀 Click below to check it out!

What are your go to books for teaching literature standards? Let me know in the comments!
Read Alouds for Teaching Story Elements Read Alouds for Teaching Figurative Language Read Alouds for Teaching Inferring Read Alouds for Teaching Theme Read Alouds for Teaching Point of View Read Alouds for Teaching Main Idea Read Alouds for Teaching Text Structure Back to School Read Alouds September 11 Read Alouds Halloween Read Alouds Thanksgiving Read Alouds Christmas Read Alouds Spring Read Alouds Read Alouds in Upper Elementary Planning Read Alouds in Upper Elementary
Want more recommended read alouds for 4th and 5th grade? Click on the links below to check out my other read aloud posts.

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Using Wonder to Teach All the Common Core Literature Standards - Teaching with Jennifer Findley

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Filed Under: Read Alouds, Reading The summer of 2014, I read Wonder by R.J. Palacio and fell in love. I immediately knew I wanted this to be my first read aloud of the year.

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If you follow me on Instagram, you already know that we have just finished Wonder by RJ Palacio as our read aloud ... but not wanting to give up Auggie just yet, we're reading The Julian Chapter from Auggie and Me. A few people have asked me about what we did during our reading of the novel, so I decided to put together a blog post with some of our favorite activities.

For our daily read aloud, I usually read for about 10 - 15 minutes a day. I don't do a reading response for our read aloud every day - usually about 2 to 3 a week, though (through our independent and shared reading, they have a lot comprehension and response minilessons so we have other avenues for practice). I also like to switch up our format a bit - bored learners are not engaged learners. We do have a reading response notebook where we do a lot of our responses, but we like to use other formats as well.

We completed one of our first favorites early on in the novel, and was a great tie-in to teaching empathy. Perhaps you've seen images from an anti-bullying lesson and crumpled paper - that one stuck with me from the minute I saw it. (There are many examples all over the web, but you can read a little more about it HERE.) I knew it would be a great lesson to go along with Wonder. We talked about how it would feel to be Auggie - to have people stare and call names. I then handed out a small piece of paper to each student. I told the students to call the paper names and say mean things to it - the kinds of things Auggie may have overheard. They were to crumple the paper in a ball as they were doing this, being responsible for the paper getting smaller and smaller and more destroyed. I then had them apologize to the paper, over and over, as they tried to smooth it out and make it "better". We talked about how the paper never went back to the way it was before - even when they tried to make it better, the marks and scars were still visible. They thought this was pretty powerful. I then had them use this paper to do their reader response on. I asked them three questions to respond to on the paper:

What did we do?

What did you learn?

How can you connect this activity to Auggie in Wonder?

Sometimes I just changed up the way we answered questions, instead of having them answer in their notebooks. I would write a quote on the whiteboard and they could respond right on the whiteboard, or use sticky notes to take notes while I was reading and post them after, and I also used a lot of printables from my Building Better Reading Responses and Stick-It-Together editable templates because they reinforced the reading response goals we were working on. I didn't have a set list of questions from the novel to choose from, instead, I came up with a question after our reading each day, thinking about the parts that really seemed to stick with the students or became great discussion starters. (You'll see color coding on some of our reading responses - this comes from our Reading Response Goals from my Building Better Reading Responses resource.)

For our summative activity for the book, our last reading response, I knew I wanted to do something special. We started by doing directed drawings of the face shape on the cover of the book. I gave each student a piece of white paper, and just told them what to draw from looking at the image. For example, I said, start out by drawing a large oval in the middle of the page, with the top being a little flatter than the bottom. For the hair, make an upside down V about an inch from the top of the oval, a little to the right of the middle. I was also drawing the same picture on the board as I was giving the instructions, so they had something to follow along. When we were done we cut out the face shapes and glued them to a piece of blue paper. We loved how these turned out!

Our last reader response question was based on a event from Auggie's graduation. I wrote this on the board:

- At the end of Wonder, Mr. Tushman said, "Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right using of strength. he is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts ...". Auggie won the Beecher medal because this quote applies to him. Explain, using evidence from the text, what this quote means and how it applies to Auggie. How did he use his greatness to make others great? It was a pretty deep question for my grade 4/5 class, but we've had many deep conversations throughout the novel, and they ROCKED it. Super proud teacher moment.

When they were done the rough drafts of their responses, they wrote their good copies right on the faces (they drew lines in pencil to write on). These turned out so wonderful! They made a great celebration and evidence of learning bulletin board, appropriately entitled, Choose Kind. :)

When you're reading a book that has so many great lessons, you just feel inspired to come up with some great lessons of your own. :)

And lastly, a fabulous way to wrap up the unit is having your students perform this super fun Wonder Drama Circle. Your students will LOVE getting to act out small parts of the novel, and they get to work on their oral fluency skills at the same time. Win.

I'd love to hear about some of your must-do lessons to go along with Wonder. Leave a comment below about something you do in your room.

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If you follow me on Instagram , you already know that we have just finished Wonder by RJ Palacio as our read aloud ... but not wanting to give up Auggie just yet, we're reading The Julian Chapter from Auggie and Me.

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Julia Roberts Owen Wilson Jacob Tremblay Dossier à destination des enseignants " Cette année, la gentillesse est contagieuse " D ' A P R È S L E R O M A N À S U C C È S " UNE PETITE MERVEILLE " FRANCE BLEU " UNE VÉRITABLE PÉPITE !

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6. "Sometimes I think my head is so big because it is so full of dreams"

7. "It's not enough to be friendly. You have to be a friend."

8. "The best way to measure how much you've grown isn't by inches or the number of laps you can now run around the track, or even your grade point average-- though those things are important, to be sure. It's what you've done with your time, how you've chosen to spend your days, and whom you've touched this year. That, to me, is the greatest measure of success."

9. "We carry with us, as human beings, not just the capacity to be kind, but the very choice of kindness."

10. "It's what you've done with your time, how you've chosen to spend your days, and whom you've touched this year. That, to me, is the greatest measure of success."

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10 quotes from Wonder that will inspire you to always choose kind

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Wonder tells the unforgettable story of August Pullman - a boy who's desperate to blend in, but is destined to stand out. Here are ten uplifting quotes from the book, that will inspire you to always #choosekind. Find out more about the novel by R.J. Palacio.

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6 lessons Wonder can teach us about bullying

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6 lessons Wonder can teach us about bullying