How To Teach
The Giver
How To Teach The Giver
• The purpose of a unit on The Giver
Lois Lowry’s The Giver is significantly better than other young adult books in the gradual
way it constructs an image of a dystopian world, leaving the reader to infer many things,
rather than explicitly telling them. Many of the activities in the following resource are
about helping students understand and articulate how Lowry constructs the book in a way
that makes its message have more impact. As such, these three topics are effective essay
response tasks that can be given to students:
*How does Lois Lowry create a disturbing vision of a future society in The Giver?
*How does Jonas come to understand what it means to be human in The Giver?
*There is both horror and hope in The Giver.
• Bookmarking/Discussing the text
As students read through this text they can fill out the attached ‘Plot Checklist’ - a tool
which helps them track the narrative stages of the story in The Giver, and scaffolds them
to have something to say about each stage. Each narrative section of the ‘Plot Checklist’
can also be cut into strips which can be used as bookmarks. Students can insert each
narrative stage bookmark with their notes on it into the part of the book where that stage
occurs. This makes a good initial discussion point when starting out a unit on the text.
Alternatively, students can use the resource ‘Hero Journey Bookmarks’ to track the
narrative stages of The Giver as they read through it. In this resource there are a series of
bookmarks each with a summary of different stages of the hero myth (simplified to fit in
with The Giver). The task for students is to cut these out and to stick them into the pages
of their novel as they read it. Each bookmark should be placed at the section of the story
that represents the stage of the hero journey on the book mark. Students can then
compare notes about stages of the hero journey in the first few classes on this text or
whole class discussion can be engaged in.
These two strategies above make ideal homework tasks. Students can read through and
bookmark the text in the month before it will be studied in class. A further resource
‘Discussion Prompts’ can be used with students to promote discussion about The Giver as
they read through the novel (for homework) or at the start of a unit on the text. To use this
resource, divide students into pairs and ask each member in the pair to pick three random
numbers between 1-12. Give each pair a copy of the ‘Discussion Prompts’ resource. The
three numbers students chose means they have selected the statements on the resource
with those numbers. Students must use these statements in a discussion with their partner
about the book. One pair member should chose one of the discussion prompts to go
first. The other pair member should respond with one of their statements - and then they
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go back and forth. Students don’t need to use the prompts in numerical order but in the
order which they find best works.
• Building a picture of society in The Giver
Lois Lowry creates a disturbing picture of society in The Giver by gradually revealing clues
of what the society is exactly like. Rather than explicitly describing the world as colourless
and repressed from the start, she allows this realisation to dawn upon the reader over the
course of the book. Students can think about this by looking through the quotes in the
attached resource ‘Building A Picture of Society In The Giver’. Students should look
carefully through each quote, circling one or more key words in them which describes an
important feature of society. In the right hand column, students should finish the prompts
to analyse what the quote reveals about society. Afterwards, ask students to look up each
of the words below and to nominate which one describes the world of The Giver best:
• Sterile
• Repressed
• Conformed
Ask students after this to think about: Why doesn’t Lois Lowry just describe exactly what
society is like in The Giver right from the start? Why doesn’t she write, right at the start,
that they kill babies and that there’s no colour or emotions? Is it because:
*It’s more interesting for the reader to have clues gradually revealed to them
*It makes the society of The Giver more horrifying to find out about it bit by bit
*The author couldn’t include all the details about what society was like right at the start
*Letting the reader build a picture of society with their imagination means the picture will
have more impact than if the reader had just been told exactly what society was like
Students can summarise what they have thought about during this activity by completing
these prompts:
Over the course of The Giver Lois Lowry gradually shows the reader that society in the
novel is...She first reveals to us...Later we see from her descriptions that society is...and
is...By giving us these clues one at a time...
• Formality of language:
One important way Lois Lowry creates a sense of society in The Giver as emotionless is
through the language people use. The need for language to be “specific”, means that
language becomes functional and concrete - there is no room for ambiguity or
interpretation. Students can think about this by looking at the attached resource
‘Language In The Giver’ which lists a range of recurring terms people use to describe
relationships and places in the world of The Giver. Although these are all words that are
used in our own world, they are not the usual words we would use. Students need to
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