Full Tilt

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.

“Illustrate a Terrifying Ride from Full Tilt”

After reading about Blake’s struggle to face the fears embodied in each of the amusement park’s rides, students develop a visual response to one of the rides and the fears it represents.

Full Tilt includes some truly frightening rides—and each one specifically targets one of Blake’s personal fears. In this activity, you will choose one of your favorites to illustrate. In your illustration, you will include key text from the novel that demonstrates how this ride targets Blake’s fears and how Blake copes with the experience. Finally, you will give your illustration a caption that summarizes what this ride conveys about where Blake is in his journey toward Finding Balance, Overcoming Trauma, or overcoming his Fear of Change.

1. Choose a ride. Make yourself a three-column chart, labeling the columns “Ride Details,” “Blake’s Fear,” and “Blake’s Response.” Go to the section of the text where the ride is discussed and fill in your chart, listing quotes and the page numbers where they occur.

2. Use the details from the “Ride Details” column of your chart to create an illustration of the ride.

3. Choose two quotes from the “Blake’s Fear” column and two quotes from the “Blake’s Response” column. Prune each quote so that it includes only the key idea. For instance, in Chapter 11, when Blake is in the dungeon with his father, he says, “Once he was free, he left. Simple as that. Just like he did all those years ago. No apologies, no thank-yous, no good-byes. Still, it didn’t change the choice I made to let him go.” Focus on a key idea to convey Blake’s response to the situation, which is “I […] let him go.”

4. Incorporate these key-idea quotes into your illustration in an artistic way—put them on a banner or a sign, show the words wrapped around Blake or on his T-shirt, make them fall from the sky or snake along the ground, etc.

5. Finally, create a caption for your drawing. This will go underneath your illustration and sum up how this moment in the story relates to a theme.

Teaching Suggestion: This activity allows students to engage creatively with a pivotal moment in Blake’s journey. Encourage them to choose a ride that they feel sure they understand and that they find visually appealing. For some rides, there are multiple locations, as the rides morph over time. Encourage students to think about which part of the ride is most important to illustrate and to focus on that location. If you wish to offer students more choices in this assignment, instead of drawing, they can create collages or use online drawing programs to create their illustrations. You can control the level of challenge in this activity by requiring more or fewer pieces of evidence in the three-column chart and in the illustration and by asking students to gather evidence either on their own or with a partner.

Differentiation Suggestion: Consider the following options.

• Students with fine-motor challenges will likely need to use online images to assemble their illustrations.
• Students with limited vision can, instead of illustrating the ride, write a brief analysis of the scene in the book, focusing their commentary on the same three areas as in the chart: what the ride looks like, how it targets Blake’s fears, and how Blake responds to the ride’s challenge.
• Students who are English language learners or those who struggle with reading comprehension or written language may need assistance in finding and pruning quotes; you might consider allowing these students to work with a partner for this part of the activity, or offer specific examples for the caption: “Blake is still not able to face his fear of change,” or “Blake begins to overcome the trauma of his father’s abandonment.”