Looking for a meaningful novel to engage your upper elementary or middle school readers? Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary is an excellent choice for a classroom novel study because it gives students so much to discuss, analyze, and write about.
Through Leigh Botts’s letters and diary entries, students explore friendship, family changes, loneliness, creativity, resilience, and growing up. At the same time, the novel provides natural opportunities to teach reading comprehension, character analysis, writing, vocabulary, text evidence, and critical thinking.
If you’re looking for a Dear Mr. Henshaw novel study that goes beyond simple comprehension questions, this beloved Beverly Cleary novel offers plenty of opportunities for meaningful ELA instruction.
Why Teach Dear Mr. Henshaw in the Classroom?
1. Students Can Relate to Leigh Botts
One of the strengths of Dear Mr. Henshaw is how realistically Beverly Cleary portrays Leigh’s experiences.
Leigh is dealing with changes in his family, adjusting to a new school, navigating friendships, and trying to understand his own feelings. These are experiences that many students can recognize, making Leigh an excellent character for classroom discussion and analysis.
Students can examine how Leigh changes throughout the novel and use evidence from the text to explain his thoughts, feelings, decisions, and actions.
2. The Novel Encourages Empathy and Emotional Growth
Dear Mr. Henshaw gives students opportunities to look at difficult situations from another person’s perspective.
Leigh experiences loneliness, disappointment, frustration, and uncertainty. Discussing his experiences can help students consider how circumstances affect people’s emotions and behavior.
Use the novel to encourage conversations about empathy, perspective, relationships, resilience, and coping with change while keeping the focus on the literature.
3. The Letter Format Makes Writing Instruction More Engaging
Because much of the novel is presented through letters and diary entries, Dear Mr. Henshaw is an especially useful book for teaching writing.
Students can examine how Leigh’s writing changes as he develops as a character. They can also experiment with writing from a particular point of view, responding to a character, or creating their own letters and journal entries.
The format provides a natural way to discuss voice, perspective, audience, word choice, and personal expression.
4. Build Stronger Reading Comprehension Skills
A good novel study should do more than ask students to recall what happened.
Dear Mr. Henshaw provides opportunities for students to practice:
- Making inferences
- Citing text evidence
- Analyzing characters
- Identifying themes
- Summarizing
- Examining character development
- Making connections
- Thinking critically about a character’s choices
These skills make the novel a great fit for an ELA novel study or reading unit.
5. Explore Resilience, Problem-Solving, and Character Growth
Leigh doesn’t simply encounter problems and move on. Throughout the story, he learns how to handle difficult situations and gradually develops greater understanding of himself and the people around him.
This makes Dear Mr. Henshaw a wonderful book for discussing character growth and resilience.
Ask students questions such as:
- How has Leigh changed since the beginning of the novel?
- What experiences have influenced his growth?
- How does Leigh respond when things don’t go as planned?
- What does Leigh learn about himself?
- How do his relationships affect his choices?
These questions move students beyond remembering the story and toward deeper literary analysis.
Make Your Dear Mr. Henshaw Novel Study Easy to Teach
Finding a great novel is only part of the job. Creating comprehension questions, vocabulary activities, writing assignments, assessments, and other materials to accompany the book can take hours.
That’s why I created a complete Dear Mr. Henshaw novel study designed to make teaching the book easier.
The unit is ready to use with printable and digital Google Drive formats, making it flexible for traditional classrooms, paperless classrooms, homeschool, small groups, or independent reading.
What’s Included?
The Dear Mr. Henshaw novel study includes:
- Teacher lesson plans and pacing materials
- Chapter-by-chapter comprehension activities
- Vocabulary and grammar activities
- Writing activities
- Reading and vocabulary assessments
- Answer keys
- End-of-book activities
- Story elements activities
- Common Core standards alignment
- Printable and digital versions
Everything is organized so you can spend less time creating materials and more time teaching the novel.
A Ready-to-Use Beverly Cleary Novel Study
Whether you’re planning a whole-class novel study, small-group reading unit, literature circle, or independent reading assignment, Dear Mr. Henshaw offers rich opportunities for reading, writing, and discussion.
And with a ready-to-use novel study, you don’t have to spend your evenings creating comprehension questions and assessments from scratch.
See what people are saying about the Dear Mr. Henshaw Novel Study by The Teaching Bank!
Want to see what’s included?
Download the free preview of my Dear Mr. Henshaw Novel Study and take a look at the ready-to-use activities.
You can purchase the novel study for Dear Mr. Henshaw at the following locations:
If you’re planning to read Beverly Cleary’s Dear Mr. Henshaw and Strider, you can also save with the Dear Mr. Henshaw & Strider Novel Study Bundle.
Connect with Fellow Educators!
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