Where the Crawdads Sing Lesson Plan

Famous First Words

Kind of Activity:

Group Work

Objective:

Students will analyze the novel's opening sentence and compare it to the famous openings of other novels.

Structure:

Owens begins the novel with a beautiful, illustrative, and compelling opening: "Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky." She continues to lovingly describe the novel's primary setting, essentially painting the marsh as another character in itself.

For this activity, students will analyze this line and compare it to the first lines of other famous novels.

In small groups, students will discuss the following questions: How did...