Deep Water

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

Survival stories often feature a protagonist or group of protagonists facing conflict while stranded in the wilderness or other dangerous, isolated locations. Use your imagination to speculate about being stranded in the ocean. What conflicts and challenges might you face? What sets ocean survival apart from other survival situations?

Teaching Suggestion: Most of this book takes place in the Gulf of Mexico. The main characters find themselves lost in open water when their boat drifts away from their dive location. Once students have a chance to address these questions, it may be beneficial for them to list details that help the people survive these real-life perils and make predictions about the novel. Information from these or similar resources can help students develop additional context on the topic.

• This Popular Science article suggests some practical tips for surviving being lost at sea.
• This Australian Broadcasting Corporation article explores an incident with clear connections to the novel: Four people surface from a dive to find the boat gone.

Short Activity

Scuba diving can be considered an extreme sport. Like many extreme sports, skills, knowledge, experience, and good decisions help to keep participants safe. Use a variety of reputable resources to answer these questions about scuba diving:

• What is scuba diving?
• What are some reasons people scuba dive?
• What are some dangers of scuba diving?
• What are 2 additional interesting facts about scuba diving?

Teaching Suggestion: This activity could be conducted in small groups; students might contribute additional questions to share with group members. This activity might include initial discussion or guidelines on finding trustworthy resources online, identifying bias, and relying on accurate facts instead of opinion.

• “Scared to Scuba? Here Are 5 Reasons It’s Finally Time to Learn” from National Geographic explores some wonders of scuba diving.
• This resource from the CDC explains some of the dangers of scuba diving, including decompression sickness.

Differentiation Suggestion: To encourage agency and for visual learners, students might create a visual representation of their learning such as an infographic or a diagram of scuba equipment with annotations that answer the questions.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the novel.

What are some strategies for approaching a difficult conversation with a family member? You may draw on your own thoughts and feelings, your experiences, or your recall of characters in books or films.

Teaching Suggestion: This topic may work best as a journal entry for privacy. The resources listed here and similar sources may be helpful; students could list pieces of advice they find particularly strong. Listing examples of potentially challenging topics may be helpful for connected discussion; small groups might discuss ways to approach these conversations and possible outcomes.

• With “Talking to Your Parents or Other Adults,” Nemours Teens Health includes a written article and audio option exploring ways to approach challenging conversations with important adults in a teenager’s life.
• “How to Have Tough Talks With Your Family” from WebMD offers a brief article with tips for difficult family discussions and suggestion on how to prepare for an important conversation.

 Differentiation Suggestions: Kinesthetic learners and interpersonal learners might have the option to act out a scene for the class emphasizing ways to approach such a conversation. Auditory learners might benefit from reading along with the audio for the article from Nemours Teens Health.