Garden Heights · Independent Novel Study

The Wednesday Wars

a novel by Gary D. Schmidt

Every Wednesday afternoon, half of Holling Hoodhood’s seventh-grade class leaves for Hebrew school and the other half leaves for catechism — which strands Holling alone in Room 213 with Mrs. Baker, a teacher he is certain hates his guts. Chalk dust and eraser duty soon give way to Shakespeare, and over the 1967–68 school year the plays start talking back to everything else in Holling’s life: a war on the evening news, a country coming apart, a sister with her own ideas, and a father with a blueprint for his son’s future. Gary D. Schmidt (author) turns one boy’s year of Wednesdays into a funny, aching portrait of an America learning to argue with itself. These 8 Part workbooks cover the full novel, with vocabulary, comprehension, literary analysis, Think Deeper reasoning, SAT & TOEFL-style practice, and writing, all built on real-world CLIL background.

Level 6Interactive & auto-gradedCLIL-based

Level 6 · Expert ReadersUS Grades 7–8Lexile 990LAR (ATOS) 5.9🏆 Newbery Honor 2008

📖 Get the right book: our workbooks follow the Clarion Books — HMH (paperback) edition — ISBN 9780547237602. All recommended editions →

Subject Personalities

The real-world subjects this novel study leans into — the depth behind every Knowledge Bank and reading passage.

PRIMARY LENS

📢 America in 1967–68 — Vietnam, Civil Rights & the Year That Broke Open

The history pressing in on Holling’s classroom — the draft and the nightly war reports from Vietnam, the civil rights movement and the assassinations of 1968, the protests and generational split that made this single school year a hinge in American life.

PRIMARY LENS

🎭 Shakespeare on the Page and the Stage

Why a seventh grader ends up reading the plays at all — who Shakespeare was and how the Elizabethan theater worked, what comedy and tragedy each ask of an audience, and how a four-hundred-year-old speech can still name exactly what a modern boy is feeling.

SUPPORTING

⚾ Baseball, Architecture & Growing Up Between a Father’s Plans and Your Own

The everyday worlds Holling is measured against — late-1960s baseball and what a hero is supposed to be, how an architect wins a commission and what a drafting table says about ambition, and the quiet work of deciding whose blueprint your life is going to follow.

8-Part Novel Study

Choose a Part

Progress

PT1

Part 1 · September–October

Half the Class Leaves and One Boy Stays Behind • Chalk Dust, Eraser Duty, and a Teacher Who Surely Hates Him • Two Classroom Rats Slip Their Cage

VocabularyComprehensionLiterary ElementsThink DeeperStandardized TestWriting

Start →

PT2

Part 2 · November

The Chores Stop and the Shakespeare Starts • A Reluctant Reader Discovers the Plays Are Full of Excellent Insults • At Home, a Perfect House and a Father With Plans

VocabularyComprehensionLiterary ElementsThink DeeperStandardized TestWriting