Classroom Corner
Welcome to Classroom Corner 2025!
Our Year 6 students are reading the novel, Wonder by R.J. Palacio and exploring its themes of kindness, acceptance, courage and empathy. Students are learning to write an analysis and recently wrote a piece where they were asked to identify how the theme of kindness is developed through specific events and character actions, and explain how the text is designed to engage and influence readers.
Here are two outstanding student examples!
Wonder
In the August section of Wonder, written from August's perspective, the author uses character interactions to help the reader understand kindness and unkindness. These examples encourage us to reflect on how showing kindness can have a positive effect in our own lives.
The character Julian showed unkindness towards August on multiple occasions, the most memorable of which being the Darth Sidious incident. In the chapter, Lamb to the Slaughter, Julian shows unkindness by asking Auggie if his favourite character is Darth Sidious. In Star Wars, Darth Sidious is electrocuted and becomes deformed. This is implying that August is ugly. It was especially awful because he did it right under the teacher's nose. She didn't know much about Star Wars, so she thought Julian was being kind.
Furthermore, Summer showed kindness by going out of her way to befriend Auggie, looking past his physical differences to see what a great kid he is. She sat with August at lunch and came to his birthday party. Summer showed empathy by leaving the popular kids to sit with August and help him feel included.
Overall, the author effectively uses character interactions to help the reader reflect on their own lives and be kinder in the future. This could include not judging people before you know them and being mindful that people could have difficulties that you can't see, for example, I have autism.
Wonder ‘Kindness’
The story Wonder written by R.J. Palacio has many acts of kindness demonstrated by many different characters in the first section of the book which is the ‘August’ chapter.
The author RJ Palacio uses contrasting examples of kindness and unkindness to help us reflect on our own behaviour and attitude towards people who are different from ourselves.
One character who is particularly unkind to August is Julian. He is a suck up to parents and teachers but is an extremely rude person and some may call bully to any other kids that are not popular or his friends. Julian has shown many unkind acts to August. The main act of unkindness is when Julian had said “is your favourite character of Star Wars Darth Sidious?” This act was showing low key bulling as the teacher teaching the lesson did not no that this was a rude comment because she simply did not know who Darth Sidious was. She wouldn’t know how this would hurt someone like August because Darth Sidious has a wrinkled face and looks scary to some people! But some people who don’t know August and didn’t know he was just a regular kid they probably think they look alike!
This was one of the many acts of unkindness shown by Julian and other characters in the book!
While a ton of the characters are rude to August there is a good contrast of kind acts as well. One of the acts of kindness in the book Wonder is demonstrated by the character Summer. This act really stood out to me because when it was lunch time August went to sit down by himself at a table. Everyone was frightened and disturbed about his face but despite all the peer pressure Summer went over to August from the ‘popular girls’ table like nothing was wrong at all with August. They got to know each other and soon made the summer table were everyone with summer names can sit at their table but of course if the kids were nice, they would let them anyway.
This shows a great act of kindness because it is very hard to avoid peer pressure especially considering August’s face and she could risk getting bullied because of this.
These demonstrations show the audience that no matter how someone acts or looks but to still be kind no matter what the scenario is and to treat everyone with the same amount of respect and kindness that everyone deserves! We should all be equal no matter what! Treat people how you would want to be treated. If you follow this you do not know how much this would change your life and that is no exaggeration!
As Clarke Pooley has said “In a world you can be anything, be kind.”
BE KIND TO EVERYONE!!!!