The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“How to Add Real Friends”

In this activity, students will demonstrate their understanding of characterization, voice, and theme in The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl by creating a presentation on making friends from Lucy’s perspective.

In The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl, Lucy learns important lessons about friendship. In this activity, you will share what Lucy has learned by creating a presentation from her perspective about how to make genuine friendships.

1. Choose Your Key Ideas

• Look back through the story and decide what important lessons Lucy learns about staying true to herself and her love of math while making friends and becoming part of a community.
• Choose three or four main points to share in your presentation.

2. Think About Lucy’s Characterization and Voice

• Make some notes about what kind of a person Lucy is so that you can create your presentation from her point of view: What does she value, and how does she think about herself and other people?
• Make some notes about how Lucy communicates:
• Does she use simple words and sentences, or more complicated ones?
• Are there words or phrases that she uses a lot, or other speech habits that you notice?
• Is she serious, funny, emotional, objective, precise, poetic? What kind of attitude (tone) do you hear in her voice most of the time?

3. Create Your Presentation

• Use the key ideas and your notes to create a presentation that shares what Lucy has learned from Lucy’s own perspective. (You will write from the first person point of view, as if you are Lucy.)
• Use both words and images that you think Lucy herself would choose.
• Cite your sources in a format appropriate to a visual presentation.

Teaching Suggestion: Depending on the age and ability levels of your students, you might want to present this activity to them in stages, asking for a deliverable after each—a bulleted list for step 1, a graphic organizer for step 2, and the presentation itself for step 3. If your students are ready for an additional challenge and if time permits, you might ask for textual evidence to back up their choices in steps 1 and 2.

When students have completed the activity, you might ask them to post their presentations to a class website or offer them time to share their work with one another in small groups. You can offer students some analytical practice by asking them to identify which aspect of each presentation they view strikes them as most in keeping with Lucy’s character or voice.

Differentiation Suggestion: English language learners, students with dyslexia, and those with attentional concerns or executive function differences may struggle to sift through large amounts of text in order to choose their key points and analyze Lucy’s character and voice. You might allow these students to brainstorm in small groups or even turn steps 1 and 2 of this project into a class-wide discussion in order to ease the load on these students.

Students with visual impairments may be unable to complete the activity as written. A reasonable accommodation for these students would be asking them to write a paragraph from Lucy’s perspective and in her voice for each key point they identify in step 1.

Paired Text Extension:

This activity can also be completed using Violet and the Pie of Life and/or El Deafo, with the instructions simply modified to use the relevant protagonist’s name. Both of these novels are written in the first person and offer similar opportunities to analyze a character’s voice and perspective.

Teaching Suggestion: Asking students to complete this activity for both The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl and one of these other texts can be an excellent opportunity for students to compare and contrast themes, characterization, and voice.