A Long Walk to Water Unit Plan + Guide

As a middle schooler, there’s only so much of the world you’ve experienced. Most of my 6th-8th grade students hadn’t been on a plane. And even fewer had traveled outside the United States. So, when they are learning about historical events or challenges faced in other parts of the world, it’s hard for them to relate to. Those problems feel so far away from their personal lives and communities. That’s one thing I love about A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park. It gives students a new perspective, without having to leave the classroom. I want to share my A Long Walk to Water unit plan, so it sparks some ideas on using this novel in your ELA classroom.

About A Long Walk to Water

A lot of websites will categorize A Long Walk to Water as historical fiction, but it’s actually literary or narrative nonfiction. The novel by Linda Sue Park is based on her friend’s life, Salva Dut.

The novel follows two people, both from Sudan. There is Salva, who left Sudan during a civil war and spent most of his youth in refugee camps. As a young adult, he made his way to Rochester, New York, where he was later adopted. Then there is Nya, a woman living in Sudan who struggled to find safe drinking water. One day, strangers survey the area and begin drilling a water well for Nya’s village. The two stories come together when Nya thanks the person who has installed the water well, and the reader learns it is Salva.

While the topic of the book might sound heavy, with wars and water scarcity, it was written with middle-grade readers in mind! There are sections of the book that talk about bombings, burnings, and death, but the message of the story is overall positive, and Salva serves as a really strong role model.

Creating A Long Walk to Water Unit Plan

Now, it’s time to create your A Long Walk to Water unit plan. This book is pretty short with only 128 pages. A lot of ELA teachers ask me which unit to use it within. Fiction or nonfiction? You can use it with your fiction unit, but just know that there are also nonfiction standards you’ll need to cover as well (and you want to be clear that it’s a literary nonfiction text). Typically, I use it with my nonfiction unit, and we talk about how literary nonfiction is a subgenre of nonfiction, how it’s different, etc.

You’ll also need to decide how much time you want to spend on the unit, how students will read the book, and how you’ll get students to dig into the text.

Personally, I spend about three weeks on the novel (12 lessons, plus a pre-lesson and some additional bonus lessons). I’ll dive more into that in the next section, or you can see my full A Long Walk to Water novel study here. Despite the book being short, there is so much to dig into, which is why I have 12+ lessons.

I also have my students read A Long Walk to Water in book clubs. This means instead of reading it as a whole group or assigning chapters as homework, they read it in a group with other students. 

Lastly, consider how you want to analyze the text. The most popular way to do this is with activities or comprehension worksheets after a chapter. But I found that my students never went deep enough into the text. We were always stuck on the surface, but never analyzing. So I implemented Socratic Seminars. Students guide the conversation, discuss the text at length, and use textual evidence to back up their claims. (More on how I do this below.)

A Look at My A Long Walk to Water Unit Plan

Once you’ve nailed down the big-picture decisions, you’ll map out your A Long Walk to Water unit plan, lesson by lesson. In my A Long Walk to Water novel study, I cover the entire book in 12 lessons, plus a pre-lesson to set expectations and a bonus lesson on objective summaries. Here’s the complete breakdown –

• Pre-Lesson: Socratic Seminar Norms
• Lesson One: Author’s Purpose
• Lesson Two: Text Structure
• Lesson Three: Central Idea
• Lesson Four: Author Claims
• Lesson Five: Key Concepts
• Lesson Six: Text Evidence
• Lesson Seven: Elaborate on Events
• Lesson Eight: Inferences
• Lesson Nine: Author’s Purpose 
• Lesson Ten: Text Sections/Theme
• Lesson Eleven: Water for Sudan
• Lesson Twelve: Comparing Texts 
• Bonus Lesson: Objective Summaries

What makes my A Long Walk to Water unit plan a bit different than others is that it isn’t built around worksheets or one-off activities. Those were never successful at getting my students to think deeply and critically. Instead, every lesson is built around the same repeatable Socratic Seminar system. (I talk about it in-depth in my workshop, The Socratic Seminar Academy.)

Students know what to expect, but it’s far from boring. We had some incredible conversations, ones I honestly never expected to hear from middle schoolers. But it’s possible! Let me show you how in the next section.

A Glimpse Inside Lesson Five

If you’re skeptical of how Socratic Seminars can work in your class (yes, even if you only have 45 minutes to teach), let me take you inside lesson five of my A Long Walk to Water unit. Remember, I use a repeatable system, so lesson five looks similar to lesson ten, but the standards and skills you focus on change.

The lesson starts with a guiding question: why does the author keep Nya’s story short each chapter, while Salva’s sections are much longer? How does this contribute to the development of her ideas for the text? This gets students thinking about the author’s intentional choices before they even start the chapter.

From there, students read chapters 8-9. You can do this as a class, stopping to cover vocabulary and comprehension along the way. Or have students read in small groups and give them a vocab or question sheet if you’d like. After reading, come back to the guiding question and give students five minutes to write their initial thoughts down.

Then comes the Socratic Seminar. You’ll introduce the interpretive question and remind students that they can reference their quick write during the seminar. Students will lead the conversation, sharing their ideas, pushing back on each other’s thinking, and using text evidence to back up their answers.

When the seminar wraps up, they’ll return to their original quick write and strengthen it by adding more reasoning and evidence that they heard in the seminar. By the end of one class period, students will have read, analyzed, and written. You are truly hitting on all the ELA skills, without having to scramble to fit everything in.
Make your A Long Walk to Water unit planning easy by grabbing my complete novel study! There’s no fluff or busy work. Instead, you’ll find reference materials, guiding and interpretive questions, a complete lesson-by-lesson breakdown, and more to help you teach this novel easily and with confidence.