EYH: Comparison Essays

EYH stands for Eat Your Homework. I am a big proponent of tying as many senses as possible into the educational experience, and raising a house full of boys has really shown me the power of food. I use food in units/lessons as often as I can. It makes an impression.

Food lends itself so well to being a great introduction to writing comparison essays. I mean, if you were to tell your kids, "Today we'll be learning how to write comparison essays," how many would get excited about that? But if you pull out tantalizing goodies to use as tools, they perk up. Don't worry, this doesn't reduce literary analysis to cheap sugar. It does give you a motivating and understandable way to introduce steps and formats from which to launch into deeper thoughts later, though.

Our first comparison exercise was with Cheese Nips and Original Cheez-Its. In addition to the obvious taste testing and the fact that they look almost the same (there are subtle differences), we studied ingredients and nutritional information, package sizes, cost, and brands. We used Venn diagrams to chart the similarities and differences. This was a case of comparing two very similar items.

Next we took to comparing three things that all have an obvious commonality--candy bars with chocolate and crisped rice--but that also differ in many ways, such as additional ingredients, shape, and texture.

After completing the Venn diagram for the candy bars, I taught them the two basic formats of comparison essays:  alternating and block.

Using our diagrams from the crackers, I walked them through a simple essay outline, point for point to show them an example. Then we tried turning it into an actual essay together. That got animated in a hurry because they didn't agree with all of my descriptions or conclusions, so we had to discuss and compromise on the actual wording. I actually loved that. It was a good use of language skills on everyone's part.

The next step was the assignment I gave them to take this lesson and write their own comparison essays on two pieces of literature they'd just read.  For my younger kids, it was to compare two Lois Lenski books of their choice, reading they've been doing with their U.S. geography studies. For my older son, I asked him to write a comparison essay on two books that have been part of his literature course--Lord of the Flies and Call of the Wild.

I actually did a similar exercise to this with my Journalism crew, and in addition to crackers had them compare Harry Potter with The Lord of the Rings and/or Disney's Tangled with Sleeping Beauty. They could either focus on comparing main characters, or villains, or plot lines, or compare all of it together. 

When we (my family) was done with this activity, one of my boys said, "We should do this experiment every week and see if we can find more differences." I don't think there are any more differences to be found, but it would be yummy to give it a try! Bottom line, though, is that thinking critically about food can teach you to think critically about literature (and anything else you may need to compare in real life decision making).