Inside Out and Back Again written by Thanhha Lai

Inside Out and Back Again
Thanhha Lai
800L

            This book is a series of short poems, each one written as a diary entry, by a 10-year-old girl as she becomes a refugee from Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Ha moves to the United States with her family and her poems reflect her viewpoint of leaving her homeland and going to a new and strange culture. She writes about her family, regular kid complaints about education, her brothers, bullying, and all with a backdrop of the Vietnam War events (protests and racism) that surround her in Alabama.

John Newbery Medal – 2012
National Book Award for Young People’s Literature – 2011

Learning Activity:
The students will read through the text and will select three days out of the diary entries. The student will look over what takes place on that day with Ha and her family and explain how events from entry 1 effect events from the next 2 entries and entry 2 leading to 3. The student will present their findings of the three entries in front of the class, explaining what happened and how Ha reacted to it.

Standards:
CCSS.ELA-L.RL.5.3 - Compare and contrast two or more characters, settings, or events in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., how characters interact).
CCSS.ELA-L.RL.5.5 - Explain how a series of chapters, scenes, or stanzas fits together to provide the overall structure of a particular story, drama, or poem.

Goal:
The student will compare three diary entries for their connectedness throughout the story.

Objective:
Cognitive -
            The student will read Inside Out and Back Again and select three diary entries throughout the whole of the text.
            The student will identify plot elements, character descriptions or story progress and then see how those aspects of the 1^st entry lead into the events of the 2^nd, and the 2^nd entry leads into the 3^rd.
            The student will read their findings on these diary entry days to the class, describing how the events are interconnected and how each character in those entries changes over the three chapters.

Outcome:
The student will learn how the story moves across the diary entries within a non-prose format. The student will identify how the events of one day cause the events of the subsequent days.

Selling Tool:

Book Review -

Inside Out and Back Again
Thanhha Lai
Harper, 2017.
288 pages

            The book Inside Out and Back Again written by Thanhha Lai is a series of poems told through the perspective of a ten year old girl during the Vietnam War as she must move from Shanghai to Alabama to flee the conflict. The poems are short and expressive of how the main character, Ha, feels about her daily life with her family and in the transition of moving to a new country. The story is for children 8 to 12 years old and can be incorporated into a poetry lesson plan or one focusing on history about the Vietnam War.

            The story includes a backdrop of the serious issues Ha’s family faces as they immigrate to the United States, racism and bullying. But it also includes aspects of what she experienced in the war itself while she was still in Vietnam. The story takes place during the war, the actual war extended from 1955 to 1975 and when Ha’s family moved to Alabama it was during the Civil Rights movement, 1954 to 1968. That region of the country was in a lot of conflict about race and outside of the difficulties of being a refugee from a war they had to face the backlash from their new neighbors who didn’t want any change to their regular way of life.

            The story describes Ha’s travels as she leaves her home forever, how she feels to lose everything but her family, and how difficult it is to understand why it’s all happening. As the diary entries are told through poems, it makes it easy to interpret in multiple ways for students. While Ha may be writing how her brothers tease her, it’s the mention in her poem of the other children that really hurts her. The book makes good use of emotive language, she describes what happens in brief language but still can tell what is going on in her life. I found the story to be more about racism and bullying than about being a refugee. If the story had focused more on the background, the time Ha was in Shanghai with her family before fleeing, it would pull more history into the story. Overall, it’s a good story to introduce to 3rd to 5th graders when discussing this time period in American history. The difference in perspective, told as through someone their own age, provides a different story than if it was from an adult about the same topic. This might make the content more accessible to students.