Hush

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

“An Exhibition of Hope”

In this activity, students will interview family members and share their real-life stories of personal struggle through a variety of creative media, and discuss common themes that emerge.

The role of community in coping with hardships is one of the themes of Hush. Despite this common thread, the members of the Green/Thomas family cope with their new lives differently. The novel ends on a positive note, indicating that the family’s future holds promise, despite the hardships they have undergone.

• Talk to several people in your family and ask them to recall a difficult time in their lives. Ask them to describe the impact of this moment and what helped them overcome it.
• Collect these stories and record them in a format that can be easily shared with the rest of your class (such as filmed interviews, artwork, or short stories).
• Display your stories alongside those of your classmates.
• Come together as a group to discuss everyone’s stories. Talk about the ones that resonated with or touched you the most, and why. See if you can identify similar themes in different stories as they appear in the novel.

Teaching Suggestion: Hush tackles heavy subject matter, such as racial violence and attempted suicide; however, it ends on a hopeful note. In a similar manner, it may be helpful to focus on the potential to overcome different hardships as a final point of discussion. The collection, presentation, and discussion of family stories may also lend itself to empathetic conversation about similarities in human struggle, and the importance of community during challenging times. In the ensuing discussion, it may be beneficial to guide students to see parallels between the class stories and Toswiah’s story.

Differentiation Suggestion: Students can be challenged to use specific media based on their individual capabilities. Those with strong language skills can be encouraged to write; those comfortable speaking in front of others can perform a short skit; musically inclined students can perform a song, original or otherwise. Students with complementary skills can also work in pairs to record and recreate stories, in order to lend each other adequate support.