In eighth grade English, middle school students are starting a unit on memoir, reading books by Megan Rapinoe, George Takei, Sonia Sotomayor, and Jackie Robinson, and the poetry of Langston Hughes. To start the unit, students did research into the similarities between fictional characters and the authors who created them, researching the lives of the authors they read, including Agatha Christie, Alan Gratz, Arthur Miller, Harper Lee, Nancy Springer, Jason Reynolds, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, and Caroline B. Cooney. Children considered how the authors integrated aspects of their own stories into fictional characters.
