Connections make interactions with text more meaningful. Students have an opportunity to connect with some serious real-world issues in this book.

• Have you ever treated someone differently because of the way they looked?
• Has someone ever treated you differently for the same reason?

“My name is August, by the way, I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse.” 

This is a great example of how the author doesn’t need to do a lot of describing in order to create a mental image. Using the graphic on the front of the book, and the character’s words, we automatically make a picture in our heads.

The author breaks the novel up into sections told by different characters in the story. Each section title gives the reader a clue as to what comes ahead. This gives readers a chance to make predictions based on titles, and shows that titles are thoughtfully crafted and shouldn’t be skipped over. Also, as each new perspective is introduced, a special quote or portion of a song lyric is written under his or her name. Students can use this as more information to predict or infer. As an extension, the teacher could ask students to think of a quote or song lyric that would be presented under their name if they were introduced into the story.

There is a chapter in the book called Letters, Emails, Facebook, Texts. Characters in the story use these different writing forms. There are many emotions implied by the author that may require different intonations to show meaning. As a class, we can read the emails and such to determine what emotion or tone the author is trying to convey. Some examples are anger, sarcasm, and empathy. This is also a great time to make a real world connection about how writing, especially in email or text message, can be easily misinterpreted.

Precept is a term that most fourth-grade students are not familiar with. Auggie’s teacher has the students write this word on the top of their English notebooks. This is a great time to make predictions about what it might mean. Next, the author gives a kid-friendly definition. As students brainstorm precepts for the class in the book, the definition becomes clearer and becomes a word they can use every day.