Prairie Lotus

Use these activities to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

ACTIVITY 1: “Dress the Part”

Hanna wants to be a dressmaker, and she enjoys sketching original dress designs. To prove her capabilities and maturity to Papa, she builds a well-constructed dress from start to finish with Bess’s help. She also notices how clothing details offer clues to one’s traits, such as when she sees cut-glass buttons on Miss Walters’s dress or notices that Pearl Baxter’s clothes are made from flour sacks.

In keeping with Hanna’s interest in clothes, choose 4-5 characters from the novel and “dress” them in representative colors, patterns, words, and images that reveal their traits, opinions, and character development.

• Draw (or download and print) on heavy-weight paper a human outline form for each of 4-5 characters.
• “Dress” each “paper doll” in clothing that befits his or her role in the story. Use clothing-shaped cut-outs from construction or scrapbook paper to show a variety of colors and patterns that symbolize each character’s traits and role in the story.
• Then, continue to “dress” each form with characterization words, phrases, and images from the text: physical descriptions, lines of dialogue especially representative of the character, personality traits, symbolic illustrations, moods, and emotions.