SIGNPOST BOOK PROJECT INSTRUCTIONS

Signposts are places in the story where an author has given us clues to help us make inferences or predictions about the theme, plot, conflict, and characters.
Authors also use these signposts to help foreshadow what will happen later in the story. Signposts are there to help guide us on our journey through the text.

The blank chart at the end of this document is a template that should be copied and pasted or recreated into a new Word document. There are two columns and five rows on this chart. The following instructions will help you understand what you are supposed to put in each column and row. Along with the chart, you must provide an illustration. Instructions for that drawing are below as well.

On the left hand side of the attached chart do the following three things:
1. Copy sentences or words (quotations or “quotes”) directly from the text that show the signpost happening in the story. Do not write the quotations in your own words! There should be five quotes total and these quotes must come from throughout the entire book. The quotes must come from the beginning, middle and end of the story.
2. Include the page number for each quotation.
3. Write the name of the signpost that the quote is an example of. Only one repeated signpost will be allowed.
On the right hand side of the attached chart, write down your thinking regarding the quotations that you wrote on the left hand side. Each thinking passage you write MUST be no shorter than five quality sentences. Use the following chart to guide you in your writing. Each writing section MUST be in the format shown on the chart. Please use the sentence starters that I have given you to begin your writing. Make sure to use details from the story to help support your thinking. This side of the chart is your thinking and should not contain quotes from the story.
On a separate sheet of paper, draw a colored illustration of a scene from the story that you found to be MOST important. Then, under your typed signpost chart, provide a typed summary of the part of the story you have illustrated and a detailed explanation (four to five sentences) as to why you believe this scene to be significant to the overall story. Look at the big picture of the whole story and think about what this scene has to do with the rest of the action in the text.
You will be graded for grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure and neatness, so please proofread your work!

SIGNPOST
PROMPT FOR YOUR THINKING
Contrasts and Contradictions:

This is where a character is acting differently than you expected him or her to act based on things they have said or done in the previous parts of the story. This is not about how YOU would act, but about what the character is doing and saying that seems “out of character” for them.

Guiding Questions: Based on the way the characters have already been acting in the story, have any of the characters done anything that surprised you? If so, what did they do or say that was surprising and why was it surprising? Why do you think they did or said that?

1. Describe the way that you see the character acting differently than how you expected them to act. “I didn’t expect the character _______ to act this way I didn’t expect this because …”
2. “I think the character ________ is doing or saying this because…”
3. Choose and then describe either a prediction or an inference you can make about the plot or conflict or a character because of this signpost. “The prediction or inference I can make about the plot or conflict or character because of this contrast and contradiction is…”
Lesson of the Wiser:

This is where a character (usually older and wiser) is giving advice to another character in the book.

Guiding Questions: Have you noticed any part in the story so far where a character is receiving advice from another character? If so, what advice was he/she given? Why was that advice given?

1.