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.

“Emotions, Weather, and the Story (Stories) of Your Life”

In this activity, students will flex their creative writing muscles by coming up with stories that, as Dan Gemeinhart does in Scar Island, connect the inner emotional lives of characters to external weather patterns.

From ominous clouds to furious storms, the external weather reflects and reinforces the inner emotional world of the book’s main characters throughout Scar Island. In this two-part activity, you will draw upon the weather to tell your own stories.

Before you begin writing, review key moments in Scar Island where the weather is featured prominently, particularly in the novel’s final chapters, in which the storm around Slabhenge gathers strength and intensity with the emotional crescendo in Jonathan’s story.

• First, select an important moment in your life that you’d like to write about. This could be anything from the birth of one of your siblings to your sports team winning a big game.
• Next, you can either decide to: (a) describe the weather as it was that day, picking and choosing which elements of the weather to enhance depending on the emotional tone of your story, or (b) create a fictional weather event to enhance the emotional meaning of your story.