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Adventure

Adventure


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Definition:

Narrative (usually fiction) in which the main character engages in a difficult, risky or unexpected venture in an exotic setting culminating in a hazardous chase, a decisive struggle, or a suspenseful or dangerous experience.

Purposes:

  • To entertain
  • To appreciate shared human experience
  • To identify with characters in adverse situations
  • To provide a life lesson

Characteristics:

  • Descriptive series
  • Characters experience events and conflict when striving to overcome obstacles
  • Engages readers in life’s big ideas, lessons and themes
  • Variations include historical fiction: specific time and place (setting); mixture of real and fictional events, or historical context with fictional characters

Themes:

  • Individuals can overcome obstacles
  • Adversity fosters growth

Characters:

  • Exhibit realistic actions
  • Plot carries characters toward adventure
  • Self actualization occurs through adversity
  • Triumph over adversity

Setting:

  • Vital to the plot
  • Realistic qualities
  • Often involves natural phenomena

Plot:

  • Action and excitement lead to climax
  • Events focus around out-of-doors, survival, exciting journeys to interesting places
  • Utilizes extremes (e.g., plagues, natural disasters accidents)
  • Strong plot includes reactions to crisis which leads to the climax and resolution
  • Tension between forces in the character’s life

Author’s craft:

  • Description and connectedness of setting with plot
  • Laying the groundwork for crisis
  • Emphasis on important points in crisis
  • Elements of danger, risk, excitement and surprise
  • Personalizes and brings characters to life (spirit and individuality)
  • Relays character’s thoughts to give the reader an insider’s view
  • Effectively uses psychological and historical research to develop story
  • Speeding up and slowing down pace
  • Reflection or insight
  • Elaborated, relevant details

Grade Level Instructional Scope for COMPREHENDING the Genre and Text of Adventure:

Grade 4

Opportunities to Teach:

Grade 6

Opportunities to Teach:

  • Shared human experience
  • Strong plot, conflict and resolution
  • Setting manipulations (flash forward, flashback) to enhance plot and suspense
  • Explain cross-text relationships
  • Importance of setting (e.g., metaphor for the conflict)
  • Events and their relationships within plot structure
  • Authenticity of high emotion/internal dialogue or monologue revealing character’s response
  • Analyzing purpose(s) of dialogue
  • Use of foreshadowing and/or flashback
  • Resolution of events

Grade Level Instructional Scope for COMPOSING the Genre and Text of Adventure:

Grade 4

Opportunities to Teach:

Grade 6

Opportunities to Teach:

  • Shared human experience
  • Characterization through thoughts and emotions
  • Dialogue to reveal motivations, contrast characters, and write about conflict or crisis
  • Word choice (helping the reader see as the writer sees)
  • Developing conflict (person against self, another person, nature or society)
  • Realistic resolution
  • Writing process
  • Using dialogue to reveal character
  • Developing specific scenes, characters and actions
  • Could include planning and developing multiple settings, flashbacks, flash forwards, scenes/episodes
  • Description refined through research
  • Characters’ development and opinions
  • Developing empathetic connections for identifying with the main character: Realism/high emotion/internal dialogue or monologue revealing character’s response
  • Use of active, visual verbs and sensory modifiers
  • Plot: events, actions, clues to character
  • Cumulative episodes, motive, ending, sequential order of events

Booklists:

Access to the Documents:

Complete K-8 Genre Project
From the Michigan Department of Education

Complete K-8 Genre Booklist
From Kent Intermediate School District


Page last modified on February 09, 2009, at 10:25 AM