100 Cupboards

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

“Make Your Own Magical Cupboard”

After reading 100 Cupboards and exploring the magical worlds Henry finds, students design their own representations of multiple settings from the novel with distinct atmospheres.

The magical cupboard the children find gives them access to many different worlds. Having so many unique settings makes 100 Cupboards an unusual book. Each of its settings has a different impact on the reader because each setting has its own atmosphere. Atmosphere is the feeling created by the details of a setting—colors, objects, movement, and elements of sensory imagery. In this activity, you will create illustrations for four of these settings. Your illustrations should show that you understand how the atmosphere of each setting differs from the others.

• Choose four settings from the story. These settings should be ones that are described clearly in the text and showcase differences in atmosphere.
• Create a “cupboard” in which four of the doors open to reveal illustrations of the settings you have chosen. You might need to add some details from your imagination, but these should fit logically with the location as it is described in the text.
• Label the inside of each cupboard door with the name of the location and a one-word summary of that location’s atmosphere.

Teaching Suggestion: This activity can be assigned as an extended project; perhaps students use a group of attached cardboard boxes to represent the various boxes detailed in the text, with the illustrations created as dioramas inside each box. Alternatively, it can be accomplished more quickly (e.g., a single class session), using doors cut into a piece of construction paper with the illustrations drawn on a piece of backing paper behind the doors. Students can be asked to create all four settings individually, or they can work with partners to divide the task. Students might add supporting quotes and details from the text to their work; writing a paragraph about each location’s atmosphere and its impact on the reader can serve as closure to the activity.

• If students need more information about atmosphere to complete the activity, you might reference this guide from SuperSummary.

Differentiation Suggestion: Students who struggle with abstract ideas may profit from some warm-up examples in which you walk them through the steps in analyzing and labeling an atmosphere, perhaps from movies or television shows that they know well or from a story you have previously read together. For students who have difficulty completing projects with many parts, you can consider eliminating three of the required boxes and just ask them to focus on representing one location and its atmosphere accurately.