Secret Lives of Animals

Ages: 8-11

From the Talking Beasts of Narnia to Warrior cats to the owl Hedwig, animal characters fill youth fiction with adventure, both realistic and fantastic. We’ll observe real animals with a ZooMobile visit. We’ll share our favorite animal stories and write some of our own. We’ll make the kinds of choices authors face when writing animal characters. To anthropomorphize (make like humans) or not? Can they talk with each other, with other animals, with humans? How will they interact with human characters, if any? How will human readers relate to them? How do we get the facts we need, and then decide whether to use them or not? Students will produce an anthology as a final project.