“The Crossover” by Kwame Alexander is the newest, greatest book to use as a teaching resource in middle school. This year I taught this book with my seventh grade students and all the kids absolutely loved it! I’m currently working on uploading all my resources, so follow my TpT store. There are FREE samples of certain products and more will be uploaded! This blog describes some of the extension activities I used with the students: Nonfiction Connections and Writing Response Journal.

Nonfiction Connections

For these two lessons, I used “The Playbook” by Kwame Alexander as a text connection.

To begin, I give the students 6 and 8 laminated slides with various quotations and images on them. I use Inductive Learning to allow the students to observe and categorize the images. I used this helpful YouTube video as inspiration.

I created two nonfiction texts based from excerpts in the book. They are both mini-biographies: The first is about Péle and second is about LeBron James. Both biographies instruct students to annotate and answer higher level thinking questions about the text. Then, each biography displays a character trait: Focus and Determination. The students are given a writing prompt to complete a journal entry about each quality. They are also given quotations and photographs to make their journals interactive.

Writing Response Journals

Here, I created a PowerPoint presentation focusing on a variety of characteristics that it takes to make a person successful. Again, I used “The Playbook” by Kwame Alexander as the inspiration for this assignment. The students are given 9 writing prompts dealing with the traits of “Focus, Determination, Grit….” Then, they are given quotations to cut out and use as an interactive notebook. I paired this activity with my nonfiction connections as well. The students enjoyed writing in their journals and making real-life connections between the text and their lives. In its entirety, the product has a 26 PowerPoint presentation or 26 .png files.