The Warden's Daughter

By Jerry Spinelli
Lexile level 550

​Sure, you’ve taught compare/contrast text structure during your non-fiction unit, but what about during your fiction unit? Jerry Spinelli’s The Warden’s Daughter open’s with a breathtaking passage comparing and contrasting a birdhouse to a prison. It sounds like a bizarre connection, but the reader soon finds out it’s the same building. Now it’s a birdhouse, but when the narrator lived there, it was a prison. After studying the gorgeous compare/contrast text structure, you can compare and contrast the first two pages of The Warden’s Daughter with the first two pages of Gennifer Choldenko’s Al Capone Does My Shirts. So, crack open The Warden’s Daughter and let the gorgeous compare/contrast text structure whisk you away to 1959.