When You Reach Me

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

1. Can the end happen before the beginning? What do you know about time travel?

Teaching Suggestion: While reading the novel, students might get caught up in trying to understand time travel, or in imagining its many possibilities, which might hinder or enhance attention to the literary elements of the text. Use this question to help get ahead of some of the inevitable tangents the time-travel plot may cause.

• NASA’s kid-friendly explainer of time-travel. This resource is not as fantastical as other sources, advanced theories, or science fiction literature/film.
• Articles from Space.com and Cosmos Magazine are more conceptually complex, but written in simple language.
• This Big Think video has several scientists breaking down the concept of time. Astrophysicist Michelle Thaller’s segment is the most simple, engaging, and straightforward.

Short Activity

What do you know about life in the 1970s? Write down some things you think you know; then research life in the 1970s. Choose one of the following: fashion, literature & film, politics/world events, and latchkey kids.