Overview

Ann M. Martin takes readers on a journey with Squirrel through the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of the stray dog's life. Creatively told from Squirrel's perspective, A Dog's Life gives readers an inside view of the kind of life a homeless dog might experience and helps raise awareness of the responsibilities of pet ownership. The interactive elements of the A Dog's Life Flashlight Readers activity and the lessons in this teaching guide challenge students to create stories from a first- or third-person point of view, make decisions to drive the plot of a story, and examine the author's writing process in order to apply some of her techniques to their own writing.

Objectives

Students will:

• Use text, images, and dialogue to construct a sequence of scenes and then write a story about the scenes using a first- or third-person point of view
• Reason through and make choices to steer a story's plot
• Use a map of sequenced events to tell a story
• View slideshows about Ann M. Martin's life as a writer and the process of creating A Dog's Life to learn about the author and her process
• Use the author's writing process as a model to create their own stories