"Catching on to Catcher in the Rye"

lessons on The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Taken from the classroom of Sandy Scragg
www.sandyscragg.com
Murry Bergtraum High School
New York City, 2002

The composition Holden wrote for Stradlater about Allie's baseball mitt:

(Written by an ESL student. This is a first draft, mostly uncorrected.

Students exchanged papers, but few corrections were made to the text on this version.)

(This assignment can be found in Lesson 2)

Two re-designed covers for the novel: (This assignment can be found in Lesson 6.)

This cover clearly shows one student's illustration of Holden being the "catcher in the rye."

This student drew on Holden's depression regarding his brother Allie's death.

The baseball mitt shown belonged to Allie and at one point in the novel, Holden writes a composition about this mitt.

Students replicated that composition in the assignment above.

One of Phoebe's detective stories starting Hazle Weatherfield:

This story was completely fictional and its plot had nothing to do with the novel, except that this is a character that Phoebe invented.

It was a creative writing assignment, and this was the first draft. This assignment can be found in Lesson 5.

If Phoebe had a home page, it might look like...

...or this:

[These web designs were done on paper using the home page template.

This assignment can also be found in Lesson 5 ]