A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
Current Events & Pop Culture
Available to teachers only as part of the Teaching A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Teacher Pass
Teaching A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Teacher Pass includes:
- Assignments & Activities
- Reading Quizzes
- Current Events & Pop Culture articles
- Discussion & Essay Questions
- Challenges & Opportunities
- Related Readings in Literature & History
Sample of Current Events & Pop Culture
Lowry Loves It
Lois Lowry's The Giver is also a story about a young protagonist struggling to make sense of the world around him. In this essay for NPR, author Lois Lowry makes a pretty convincing case for why A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is so awesome, mostly because of how it deals in a straight-up way with sex. Some of your students might have read Lowry's novel, so maybe this will help to get them on the Tree train.
It was raw and real and, to me at 13, often shocking. But I never confided in my friends with a giggle that I had found a new dirty book — it wasn't. It was a book about life that revealed more to me than my earlier loved books ever had. I treasured it, and Francie, and my new knowledge of her world, the same world of mingled flesh and feelings I would one day enter. (Source)