As I'd done several times in the past (because of MLV support), I designated "walls" for collecting work and ideas on sticky notes for each of the main characters in the novel.
I had been disappointed in the past that students didn't seem to be as interested in these walls as I had hoped. I added photos of students looking at the walls and gave the students a specific assignment to read the wall of a character that they were NOT assigned, and write a note about what they learned from reading the wall. These were placed on stickies of a different color so as not to be confused with the comments of "experts."
Joan had the wonderful idea of having students create "found" poems about their characters using language found in the book and around the room. This assignment came out of our experience of documenting the students working on poetry projects and seeing how engaged they were and trying to use their excitement about poetry to fuel this end-of-the year novel unit. We were also feeling that they were beginning to develop some important understandings about poetry that we wanted to reinforce, even though the poetry unit was over. Finally, This seemed like an excellent opportunity to spend time with others' ideas - via the character walls - and for reflecting on learning. Not only would students create these poems, they would color-code them to show where the language had come from.
Looking back now, I think what was probably more important than the sequence of units, was the way that Joan and I tried to listen to the class and tried to make links from unit to unit and to build on what students were doing well to help them with things they found challenging. I'm not sure it is so important that we do the poetry unit right before LOTF, but that we keep listening and responding to the group from unit to unit.