Teaching Moon Over Manifest

Instructions for You

Objective: Good morning, Teacher X. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, involves espionage, secret recordings, and making inferences. You have forty-eight hours to recruit your students and meet us in the staff lounge to receive further instructions on this assignment. As always, should any member of your class be caught, we will disavow all knowledge of your actions. This message will self-destruct in five seconds.

While Abilene, Lettie, and Ruthanne sneak around town in search of the spy known as the Rattler, your students will do a little snooping of their own. For this activity, students will secretly follow one of the main characters in Moon Over Manifest and record everything the character says and does in a secret spy journal.

Okay, not exactly everything. However, they'll need to collect enough evidence to reveal the character's true personality. With a bootlegger turned preacher, a quick-handed con artist, a Hungarian fortuneteller who only sees into the past, and a nun who moonlights as a midwife, students will have plenty of psychoanalyzing to do as they characterize the citizens of Manifest past and present.

This activity is best done once you've finished reading the book, and you can expect it to take one class period, though if students get really into it, they might wind up finishing for homework.

Materials Needed: Each student will need a spy journal of some sort (dedicated notebooks, writing paper stacked between construction paper and stapled together—whatever works best for you); copies of the book

Step 1: How do writers reveal a character's personality? A class discussion on characterization is a great intro to this activity. You can remind students that authors sometimes reveal a character's personality by telling readers things directly, but most often we have to figure it out on our own. Ask students what clues authors give about the characters. Depending upon their answers, you might want to add:

• What they look like
• What they say (what words they use and how they say them)
• What they do (including how they interact with other characters)
• What they think
• What other characters think and say about them

Step 2: Ask students if they've read the book or seen the movie Harriet the Spy. Discuss what Harriet writes in her notebook, and tell students that they're going to spy on one of the major characters in Moon Over Manifest and record their observations in a secret journal. Hand out the spy journals (or supplies to make them) and then model what an entry should look like. Each entry should include:

• Chapter or page number
• Clue (a.k.a. evidence from the text)
• Code breaker (a.k.a. what can be inferred about the character)

Step 3: Now give each student one character to track. Take a small slip of paper, fold it in half, and on the outside write the words top secret. Inside, write the following:

Your mission is to reveal the character traits of ____________ (character's name).
It'd be really cool if you used invisible ink for this part (here's a simple recipe for you).

Step 4: For fun, have students get into small groups and read clues to each other, seeing if they can guess each other's characters. This is a chance for them to deepen their understanding of characters besides their own. Most importantly, though, make it crystal clear that kids need to hold onto their spy journals in order to do the next activity ("Ode to a Static of Dynamic Character").

Instructions for Your Students

Objective: Are you ready to go undercover? We hope so because we have some top secret work for you to do. While Abilene, Lettie, and Ruthanne sneak around town in search of the spy known as the Rattler, you're going to do some snooping of your own. You'll spy on one of the main characters in Moon Over Manifest and record your observations in your very own spy journal. Your mission is to collect enough clues in order to reveal the character's true personality. Now get out your binoculars, some invisible ink, and your secret decoder ring—you have some spying to do.

Step 1: Perform the secret handshake with your teacher. Walk away quietly and open up the slip of paper that somehow made it into your hand. It contains your first clue—the name of the character (a.k.a. "the suspect") you'll be tracking.

Step 2: Open your spy journal. At the top of the first page, record the suspect's name, rank, and serial number. What do you mean you don't have the rank and serial number? Okay, then just write the character's name.

Step 3: Gather the intelligence. As you read the novel, look for clues that reveal the suspect's personality traits and record them in your spy journal. You'll want to focus on what the character says, does, thinks about, and even what the other characters say and think about him or her. Then decipher the clues to reveal your character's personality traits. Let's take a sneak peek at a sample journal entry on Abilene Tucker.

• Chapter or page number: Shady's Place (including the chapter and/or page number from your copy of the text)
• Clue: Abilene says, "I've lived in a lot of places. Barns, abandoned railroad cars, even Hoovervilles, the shack towns for folks with no money…"
• Code Breaker: She's resilient.

Step 4: Save that spy journal. You're going to need it for the next assignment.