Funded Mar 19, 2025Thank you for your donation and helping us to get books into our classrooms. The book that you helped us be able to read this year is called Starfish by Lisa Fipps. This book deals with so many topics that are important to middle school students. Some examples are: bullying, body image, family issues, losing a friend, making a friend, speaking with a therapist, conditional vs unconditional love, learning to find your voice, being small vs taking up space, and so many more.
The biggest topic that we have explored with this book is bullying. There are so many examples in this book of reasons why people get bullied and who does the bullying. The main character, Ellie, gets bullied by kids at school and by her own family members about her weight. Another boy (who bullies her himself) is bullied for being low-income. The family who lives next door to the main character are bullied for being immigrants.
At our school over the last year or so, we have seen an uptick in students who are going through similar issues. As a team, we wanted to address these issues head on. One of the lessons we used to help address the theme of bullying is to pair the book with a nonfiction text. We had students go to the website https://www.stopbullying.gov/kids/facts and read facts from the government about bullying. Then we compared what is listed with the journey our main character has been put through. Many of our students identified with this journey and shared personal stories of ways they have gone through these same struggles and it was a powerful moment to be able to see under the iceberg of our classmates' lives.
Another lesson we used to address the theme of body image was partnering the book with the Dove Self-Esteem project which includes videos and stories of people who have had trouble with being happy with the way they look because people have bullied them about it or because of the way the media portrays beauty. Some students took this to heart and really started to evaluate what is seen as beautiful and noticing the beauty in everyday things.
This book is a novel in verse and so many of our students have never read a book formatted this way. Teaching with this book has helped us to be able to incorporate lessons about poetry and figurative language in a new way that students were excited about.
Your donation helped to bring two class sets of this novel to our school. Because this book covers heavy themes, we have decided as a team to read it whole class. This means that each student has a copy of the book and we take turns reading each poem. We have created discussion questions in advance to help students think critically about these topics and also provide space for them to work through the story. We have had some very rich discussions indeed!
Thank you again from the bottom of our hearts for donating and helping all of these lessons be possible.
LMAAC 5th and 6th Grade Teachers”
With gratitude,
Mrs. Meckstroth