Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Who Wants to Win a Billion”

In this activity, students create an original version of a Who Wants to Win a Billion questionnaire to reflect their own life experiences and draw comparisons to Thomas in the novel.

Create 12 questions based on your life experiences (you should know the answers to these questions) and write a narrative to explain how you learned the answers to the 12 questions you created. Consider exploring these topics to draw comparisons to Thomas’s experiences in the novel:

• Class differences
• Corruption
• Big business
• Identity
• Injustice
• Fantasy versus reality
• Important people
• Life-changing events

During your opportunity to share your questions, explain how each of the questions you developed mirror Thomas’s experiences in Q & A. After the class has shared questionnaires, discuss in a journal entry the ways in which the questions revealed class members’ histories. What general points of comparison can be made to the storytelling techniques in the novel?

Teaching Suggestion: You may wish to provide additional details for how students should present their questionnaire and life story. Consider having students present their questions in a slideshow, allowing the class to guess the answers to the questions, then permitting the student to explain how the experiences taught them each answer.