Lucky Broken Girl
Written by Ruth Behar & published by Penguin Random House, ©2017
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Grade Level: 3-6 Whole Class Read
Lexile Score: 670L Accelerated Reader: 4.2
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In this novel set in the late 1960s, Ruthie Mizrahi has recently moved from her homeland of Cuba to New York. She is finally beginning to get used to life in this new country and is all set to be moved from the "dumb class," as Ruthie puts it, to the "smart class." But just before Ruthie begins her first day in her new classroom, her family gets into a terrible car crash that leaves Ruthie is a cast from the tips of her toes up to her chest. Ruthie must navigate her new, bedridden life as she waits for her legs to heal and experiences life from a new perspective.
Key words/phrases: Cuban culture, hope, struggle, acceptance, & healing
Suggestions for the Classroom
This video, posted on Youtube by Ruth Behar, is a book trailer for Lucky Broken Girl, which can help students preview the book before reading.
This link brings you to Ruth Behar's biography on her website. Behar writes about the experience that inspired Lucky Broken Girl, her being in a body cast for a year as a child, here.
click the image to be linked to the website
This link brings you to an online Q & A with Ruth Behar from the publisher of the novel, Penguin Random House.
click the image to be linked to the website
SUGGESTED COMMON CORE STATE STANDARD:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.3
Describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as
how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution.
KEY VOCABULARY
Bilingual: someone who speaks two different languages fluently
Commiserate: to feel sympathy or pity for someone
Gait: the way a person walks
Invalid: someone who is sick, weak, or disabled because of an injury
Perspective: point of view
Refugee: someone who has left their home country to escape things like war, a natural
disaster, or something else negative.
COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES
Before Reading: Lucky Broken Girl is set in 1960s New York and focuses on a family of Cuban immigrants. Introduce students to the events that were occurring in Cuba during this time period using this interactive Cuban Revolution timeline. As another resource, show students this Ted Ed, video focussing on Che Guevara and The Cuban Revolution, to provide them with strong background knowledge before beginning to read about Ruthie and her family's life after immigrating from Havana, Cuba to Queens, New York.
During Reading: Penguin Random House, the publisher of Lucky Broken Girl has created a strong list of discussion questions for this text that tie into sixth grade Common Core State Standards. Divide students into discussion groups and have groups meet periodically throughout reading the text to talk about selected questions from the publisher. You can find the discussion questions in here.
After Reading: Have your students work individually or in pairs to create a book trailer for Lucky Broken Girl. Students should begin by planning out and writing scripts for their video. After this portion is complete, students can use Adobe Spark, a free video making program to create their trailers.
WRITING ACTIVITY FOR INFERENTIAL COMPREHENSION:
After reading the text, have students pick one of the main characters followed throughout the book and write a monologue for their character. The monologue should focus on a specific moment in the text and include what the character was thinking and/or feeling during that moment. After writing the monologues, students can record and post a reading of their monologue using the website Flipgrid for their peers to see. The password for the linked Flipgrid is "LBG2020!" Or, you can create your own by creating a free account using this link.