Boom Learning is used for the multiple-choice, short answer, and fill-in-the-blank questions such as comprehension and vocabulary practice.Īctivities that require more open-ended responses may be found in Google Slides. This novel study includes links to digital resources. Version #3 - The Cay Abridged Printable Book Unit (This version contains vocabulary practice, comprehension questions, and writing prompts.) Version #2 - The Cay Printable Book Unit (This product contains the full printable version.) Version #1 - The Cay Digital + Printable Book Unit (This product contains the full printable version + interactive quizzes + PowerPoints + Boom Learning Decks + Google Digital Slides.) This is the full printable + digital version, containing digital task cards hosted by Boom Learning, online quizzes, PowerPoint lessons, and activities for Google Slides. This comprehensive unit includes vocabulary, comprehension questions, writing prompts, lessons on sentence errors, dialect, story elements, and activities aligned to the Common Core Standards for grades 5–7.Ĭheck out all three versions of The Cay Book Unit to determine which best fits your teaching needs and style. Martin Luther King Jr.Are you looking for an all-in-one novel study for The Cay by Theodore Taylor? Look no more. For a short period of time The Cay was banned and was classified as racist, but this was a gross mischaracterization, as this book involves a child discovering the folly of racism. In the book, the boy sheds his racist views as he learns to admire and respect the black man who rescues him from the ocean.

'The one thing I remembered about was that his mother had taught him to hate black people and to hate them with a passion,' Taylor once told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times.

Taylor based the character of the boy in his book on a childhood playmate. It has seen worldwide sales in the millions. The Cay, Taylor's fictionalized account of the boy on the raft, took only 3 weeks to complete, and has become perhaps the most beloved of his young adult fiction novels. During walks along the beach, Taylor would look out to the Atlantic Ocean horizon and imagine the boy holding on to the raft and praying for rescue.

By the time the submarine left, it was dark and the raft was no longer visible to the occupants of the lifeboat.įor the next decade, Taylor pondered the ordeal of the boy on the raft. A German submarine surfaced between the lifeboat and the raft, preventing the occupants of the lifeboat from attempting a rescue of the boy. The majority of the survivors crawled into a lifeboat, but one 11-year-old Dutch boy (Phillip) swam to a raft that had been launched by the force of the torpedo impact. Taylor read an account of a Dutch ship being Torpedoed by the Germans in 1942. Taylor came up with idea of the plot for The Cay while conducting research at the Coast Guard archives for his 1958 non-fiction book Fire on the Beaches.

The cay book by theodore taylor