Tiger hunting

In yesterday's post I mentioned that my kids were reading "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell. For those of you who don't know the story, here's a short synopsis I totally stole from Wikipedia:

Sanger Rainsford, a hunter, and his hunting companion, Whitney, are traveling to the Amazon Rainforest to hunt the Jaguar. After a discussion about how they were the hunters instead of the hunted, Rainsford hears shots, drops his pipe, and falls off of their boat while trying to retrieve it. He washes up on an island, Ship-Trap Island, that is the subject of local superstition.

He finds a Palatial Chateau owned by a Cossack hunter named General Zaroff and his Cossack servant Ivan. General Zaroff had heard of Rainsford as he is a big game hunter who read his book. Over dinner, General Zaroff explains to Rainsford how he became so good at hunting that he became bored and unchallenged with it. He then decided to live on an island where he captured shipwrecked sailors and sent them, with only food, a knife, and moccasins, into the jungle. Three hours later, he followed them to hunt them. If they eluded him for three days, he let them go, but he had so far managed to kill them all.

Zaroff tells Rainsford that he would be the next person he hunted. Rainsford runs into the forest and climbs a tree. Zaroff finds him easily, but decides to play with him like a cat with a mouse. Next Rainsford sets a tiger trap, which kills one of Zaroff's hounds. Finally, he set a trap with his knife that kills Ivan , but not Zaroff. As the hounds approach, Rainsford jumps off a cliff into the ocean. Zaroff assumes he has killed himself and returns home. Rainsford is there, having swam around the island. Zaroff congratulates him and offers to send him home, but Rainsford decides to fight him, and says "I'm still a beast at bay."

The last sentence of the book shows the General accepting the fight, saying that the loser should be fed to the dogs and the victor would sleep in the master bedroom's bed. Although it is not directly stated in the story, it is implied that the General lost and was fed to his hounds because of Rainsford's last words - "he had never slept in a better bed."


Anyway, it took us two days to read the story out loud together as a class. It's a great read, full of lots of detail and lots of action. It totally gets their attention, especially the boys. As we read, I stop and talk with them about the story. I model different reading strategies, and we make connections with the text. One of the things I do is ask them to predict. That's what good readers do, so we practice it.

Before we even started, I asked them what they thought the story was about based on the title and the picture on the first page. M, a 15-year-old boy, immediately pipes up with, "I think it's about hunting. And I think they are going to hunt tigers because that's a type of dangerous game!" I thanked him for his answer, talked over a few more guesses from other kids and got started.

Partway through the story General Zaroff is talking to Rainsford about how he has gotten bored with hunting because it's too easy for him. Then he says that he has imported a type of big game on to his island for hunting. I stopped and asked the kids what type of big game they thought it could be. M again puts in his bid for tigers. He said, "I really hope they hunt tigers!"

Once they found out General Zaroff hunts humans, they were appropriately grossed out and intrigued. The story went on, and at the end, M said, "Well, even though they didn't hunt tigers, this was a pretty cool story."

The boy was really looking forward to some tiger hunting apparently.

Anway, on Thursday kids were working on their maps of the island, and M was focused on his work all hour with his partner.

After school, I was looking their maps over, impressed with many, disappointed in a few. Reduced to hysterics when I saw M's map.

In the water surrounding the island, he added his own special touch.

A tiger shark.