Encourage students to jot down unfamiliar words and try to define them, taking
clues from the context. Such a list may include insemination,
inconsequential, solicitous, camaraderie, chastise, calibrated,
medicinal, attributes, derisive, fastidiously, profusion, mimicry,
agility, luxuriant, benign, eradicate, precipice, malignant,
convoluted, sardonic, tenacity, pliant, malevolence, and
resilience.
This guide was created by Pat Scales, Children’s Literature Consultant,
Greenville, South Carolina.
Lois Lowry is known for her versatility and invention as a writer. She
was born in Hawaii and grew up in New York, Pennsylvania, and Japan.
After several years at Brown University, she turned to her family and to
writing. She is the author of more than thirty books for young adults,
including the popular Anastasia Krupnik series. She has received
countless honors, among them the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, the
Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award, the California Young Reader’s Medal, and
the Mark Twain Award. She received Newbery Medals for two of her novels,
Number the Stars and The Giver. Her first novel, A Summer to Die,
was awarded the International Reading Association’s Children’s Book
Award. Ms. Lowry now divides her time between Cambridge and an 1840s
farmhouse in Maine. To learn more about Lois Lowry, see her website at
http://www.loislowry.com.