A Wrinkle In Time – Novel Study Ideas
Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 science-fiction classic, A Wrinkle in Time makes for a fantastic classroom novel study. I read it as a kid in Mrs. Price’s class and, once I became a teacher, we read it every year. My six-year-old is utterly fascinated by it. (We read the graphic novel version as a scaffold for him. But now he’s listening to the full audiobook!)
Summary
In A Wrinkle In Time, 13-year-old Meg Murry travels across space and time in search of her father. She is accompanied by classmate Calvin O’Keefe (oldest of eleven children) and her profoundly gifted 6-year-old brother, Charles Wallace.
Meg is guided by a trio of strange, supernatural ladies (Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which) who teach her to travel across dimensions by tessering – that is, hopping across a titular wrinkle in time. Meg hopes to not only find her father, but understand why he’s been missing.
What To Study?
What’s a good topic to study throughout this book? Here are a few ideas.
Fantastical vs Mundane
Like all great science fiction, A Wrinkle In Time uses the fantastical to give us a fresh look at the everyday. So, I might frame the book around the question: “How does the fantastic help Meg to understand her regular ol’ Earth problems?” We’d come back to this throughout the story, perhaps after each chapter.
Contrast The Trio
Or you could frame your novel study around the fascinating trio of Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin. When I compare and contrast, I’m careful to include specific criteria.
I don’t want kids writing obvious things like:
- ❌ Meg is a girl but the others are boys
- ❌ Charles Wallace is short but Meg and Calvin are tall
- ❌ Meg and Charles Wallace are Murrys but Calvin is an O’Keefe
Yeah… no. Instead, ask students to contrast:
- Motivations – What does each character want?
- Consequences – Do different characters face different outcomes from similar actions?
- Or how about… uses of Power!?
If you’ve read Matilda, it would also be interesting to compare and contrast Charles Wallace with Matilda.
Universal Theme: Power
I just love using “Power” as an overarching theme. And it works beautifully with A Wrinkle In Time! The story is all about the power of family love compared to the power of hate and fear. We could contrast the alluring power of fitting in (as on Camazotz) versus Meg and Charles Wallace’s power of being so very different from other people. How are conformity and non-conformity both forms of power?
We could explore my go-to statement that “Power can be seen or unseen,” but I also think that “Power is the ability to influence” would be super interesting.
As always, we’d simply be gathering examples of power as we read each chapter. As we go, we’ll discuss whether the generalization I’ve chosen applies to the book or not. And students can certainly come up with their own, better generalization!
Remember, the purpose of these abstract ideas is to serve as an anchor point, something to come back to no matter what happens in the story. But they also connect across novels and other topics. Pick a single abstract idea and you can use it literally everywhere!
Extensions
Any great novel is going to naturally open up extension possibilities. Students can informally look into things like:
- Exoplanets! What earth-like planets do we already know about?
- Centaurs and other mythological beasts – I love that this sci-fi story has a planet populated by creatures from ancient myths!
- Tesseracts – Yes, it’s a real thingy! The 4D version of a cube. Of course, this should open up a study of the fourth-dimension and things like wormholes too!