Chris has a master's degree in history and teaches at the University of Northern Colorado.
Trapped by the Ice! is a book by Michael McCurdy about an ill-fated expedition to across Antarctica that actually happened in 1915. The story follows Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew as they are forced to abandon their ship The Endurance to cross Antarctica by foot. These activities are designed to be completed in class and can be adapted to any grade level that might be working with this text.
After reading Trapped by the Ice!, each student will either select or be assigned several sections of the book. Since the book is broken into events by dates, this should be easy to do. Students will re-write their sections in the first person perspective, imagining how the actual crewmembers might feel about these events.
You can ask students to re-write all of their sections from the perspective of a single individual, or you can ask them to re-write each section from a different character's perspective. In either case, students should focus on how people would feel in these experiences, as well as what they would see, hear, etc., on their journey.
As they read Trapped by the Ice!, students will create a timeline of events. For each entry on their timeline, they should write out what happened and who was involved. You can make these timelines pretty straightforward, or you can ask students to make these timelines more complex. Here are some options for doing so:
Materials: Copies of Trapped by the Ice!, paper or poster paper, other art supplies as desired
After reading Trapped by the Ice!, each student will create a notebook that lists each character, defines their traits based on moments from the book, and summarizes that person's experiences. Students will have to read through the story several times to examine each character and consider the narrative from each character's experiences.
Once they have created this encyclopedia of characters from the story, students can be asked to conduct an imaginary interview with each character and ask them about their experiences. Ask students to come up with a list of questions they would want to ask people from this expedition, then try to answer those questions as they imagine each character would, based on their personalities and experiences.
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