The brain

by Tory Woollcott

Tory Woollcott’s The Brain invites readers to investigate how brains evolved, how memories form, and how the nervous system helps make each person unique. Its illustrated, comics-style presentation makes complex science approachable through visual explanations, conversational language, and humor. Although listed here as fiction, the book’s scientific explanations are best taught as informational content within a playful narrative framework.

Big Idea

Our brains help us sense, remember, learn, and develop our individual identities. Writers and illustrators can make complicated ideas understandable by carefully pacing explanations, images, questions, and moments of humor.

Discussion Questions

1.The book asks what makes you, YOU. How might memories, interests, relationships, and experiences all contribute to your identity?
2.Why might an author explain the brain through comics rather than through paragraphs alone? What can pictures explain especially well?
3.How does learning about the brain’s evolution change the way you think about humans and other animals?
4.Which part of the book made you slow down, wonder, or look again? What did the author or illustrator do to create that response?
5.The brain is sometimes compared to an operating system. How is that comparison helpful, and where might it stop being accurate?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 45 minutes: 8 minutes reading, 7 minutes modeling and planning, 15 minutes creating, 10 minutes partner revision, and 5 minutes sharing.📦 Selected book pages, paper, pencils, crayons or markers, a board or chart paper, and optional sticky notes.

Learning Goals

Describe a simplified relationship among sensory information, the brain, memory, and a response.
Identify at least two ways words and pictures work together to explain a scientific concept.
Create an ordered informational comic with a clear beginning, middle, and ending.
Use a pacing choice, such as a larger panel, short caption, or purposeful pause, to emphasize an idea.
Distinguish a playful comparison from a literal scientific explanation.

Activity Steps

1.Read selected pages about the brain, senses, or memory. Model noticing one scientific explanation and one craft choice, such as a short exchange, diagram, or change in visual emphasis.
2.Choose a familiar situation: seeing a library book, hearing a song, or smelling lunch. Orally rehearse a simplified sequence: notice a cue, process information, connect with a memory, and choose a response. Explain that real brain activity involves interacting networks rather than a single straight path.
3.Fold paper into four panels. Students sketch their sequence using arrows, captions, and drawings; younger students may dictate their explanations.
4.Add one clearly labeled comparison, such as a memory represented by a scrapbook. Discuss why the brain does not literally contain a scrapbook or store memories like identical computer files.
5.Revise the comic’s pace: make the noticing moment quick, give the memory moment more room, and make the response clear. Partners read the comic and identify where they sped up or slowed down.
6.Share selected comics and complete an exit response: 'One thing my brain helps me do is …' and 'One way I guided my reader was …'

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.7 — With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the text in which they appear.
ELA: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.3.7 — Use information gained from illustrations and words to demonstrate understanding of a text.
ELA: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.2.2 — Write informative/explanatory texts that introduce a topic, develop it with facts, and provide a concluding statement or section.
Science: NGSS 4-LS1-2 — Use a model to describe how animals receive information through their senses, process information in their brains, and respond in different ways.
SEL: Self-awareness — Reflect on how experiences, memories, interests, and emotions contribute to individual identity. Select grade-specific standards appropriate to the class; these connections span the requested K–5 range.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

The Brain offers a useful mentor text for studying how writers pace an explanation. Its subjects—evolution, memory, and identity—are too complex to absorb all at once. In selected passages, invite students to notice how the comics format divides information into smaller encounters: a reader examines an image, follows language, connects an idea, and then moves ahead. For K–2, read a short excerpt aloud and model these moves; for grades 3–5, have students annotate a manageable sequence of panels. In a Pace-Write-Read workshop, students first trace how quickly or slowly they read a passage, then make an intentional pacing choice in their own work, and finally test that choice with a partner. Emphasize that fast is not automatically better: a quick exchange can invite curiosity, while a spacious diagram or thoughtful question can give a difficult concept time to settle. Use the elements below as observation prompts, not as claims that every literary device appears in every passage; when a device is absent, students can consider whether adding it would clarify or distract from the science.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	Compare how long students spend reading an exchange with how long they spend examining a brain explanation. Ask which features make them move quickly and which invite rereading.
2. Plot	Distinguish movement in the narrative framework from movement through scientific ideas. Track how an unanswered question about the brain creates a reason to keep reading.
3. Prosody	Read a short passage aloud twice, first flatly and then with phrasing that supports its meaning. Discuss where a pause helps listeners understand an unfamiliar brain term.
4. Word	Choose a scientific word from the selected pages and study how nearby language or pictures support it. Try replacing it with a vague word and discuss what information disappears.
5. Concept	Name the central idea of a selected sequence, such as memory or brain evolution. Ask students to identify which panels build that idea and which provide a useful breathing space.
6. Voice & Worldview	Notice how an approachable, curious treatment invites readers into difficult science. Discuss how the book presents the brain as something worth investigating rather than something readers must already understand.
7. Point of View	Identify who is speaking or explaining in the selected passage. Ask how the explanation might change if it came from a learner, a scientist, or an imagined neuron.
8. Setting & Place	Distinguish a location in the narrative framework from a diagram or imagined view inside the body. Discuss how visual transitions help readers know what kind of space they are seeing.
9. Original Characters	Study how figures in the narrative framework give readers someone to follow between explanations. Students can invent a curious guide for their own comic while keeping its scientific claims accurate.
10. Dialogue	Find an exchange that introduces or clarifies a brain question. Compare its pace with a single explanatory caption containing the same information.
11. Details	Choose one small visual or verbal detail that helps explain a brain process. Ask whether removing it would make the passage faster, less clear, or both.
12. Descriptions	Examine how descriptive language and illustrations share the work of representing the brain. Have students add only the words a reader still needs after looking at an image.
13. Firsts	Locate the first appearance of an unfamiliar term in your excerpt. Notice what support readers receive before they are expected to use or remember it.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Connect the book’s questions about remembering and identity to experiences students recognize. Discuss why beginning with an everyday mystery can engage readers before a technical explanation.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Compare a moment shown through action or dialogue with a passage that condenses scientific information. Explain how switching between the two can prevent an explanation from feeling overloaded.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Find a question whose answer is delayed or a fact that challenges an initial assumption. Discuss how intellectual curiosity can create suspense without an action scene.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Use the evolution material to distinguish scientific discussion of the past from a character’s flashback. If the excerpt has no flash-forward or cliffhanger, consider whether either would genuinely help explain the topic.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Examine a page turn or section boundary in the available edition. Ask what question or incomplete explanation encourages the reader to continue and what the next section delivers.
19. Pace & Creativity	Challenge students to explain a brain-related idea in both two panels and four panels. Compare which version gives a new reader enough time to understand.
20. Play	Look for playful language or images that make an abstract idea approachable. Ask students to explain the science underneath the play so the joke does not become a misconception.
21. Performance	Perform a short exchange from the book using voices and a deliberate thinking pause. Let classmates describe how the performance changed their understanding of the explanation.
22. Personality	Notice how expression, posture, or wording gives a speaker personality. Discuss how a distinctive reaction can make a scientific question feel human and memorable.
23. Humor	Select a humorous moment and identify whether its timing depends on words, pictures, or their combination. Ask whether it introduces an idea, offers relief, or helps readers remember.
24. Pause	Build a deliberate pause after a demanding explanation about memory or evolution. Students point to the image or reread the phrase that helps them make sense of it.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Investigate the operating-system comparison associated with the book’s premise as a metaphor. Have students explain both its usefulness and its limits rather than treating it as a literal description.
26. Repetition	Track a scientific term or visual idea that returns across selected pages. Discuss how returning to an idea can strengthen understanding without repeating an entire explanation.
27. Rhythm	Read a sequence aloud and listen for changes between short exchanges and longer explanations. Connect those changes to the visual rhythm of moving from panel to panel.
28. Punctuation	Study how punctuation shapes a question, reaction, or explanation in an actual speech balloon. Rewrite one line with different punctuation and test how the reading changes.
29. Questions	Use the book’s inquiry into memory and identity to distinguish questions science can investigate from broader questions with many possible answers. Have students write one of each.
30. Compare-Contrast	When reading about brain evolution, identify the specific organisms or features the passage compares. Avoid describing living animals as steps on a ladder toward humans.
31. Objects	Notice whether a familiar object helps explain something invisible or abstract. Students can use a scrapbook to represent aspects of memory, then state why a brain does not literally work like one.
32. Threes	Check whether the selected passage groups examples or actions in threes rather than assuming it does. Students can test a three-part recap—notice, remember, respond—as a deliberately simplified writing structure.
33. Lists	Find a group of examples or facts and discuss how its arrangement affects readability. Compare a dense sentence with a short list that gives each idea room.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Examine space around panels, text, and diagrams. Ask how crowding or openness changes the effort required to follow a brain explanation.
35. Art & Graphics	Identify information communicated primarily through diagrams, arrows, labels, or expression. Cover the words briefly, then restore them to determine what each mode contributes.
36. Interactives & Gamification	Turn an explanation into a teacher-created prediction challenge: pause, invite a guess, and read on to check it. Make clear that this is a classroom adaptation, not necessarily a printed feature.
37. Placement	Trace the intended reading path through a page. Discuss how the placement of balloons, captions, and images determines when readers encounter a question and its answer.
38. Form	Compare the book’s comics-based explanation with a conventional science paragraph. Ask what each form makes easier and why visual sequencing is useful for explaining processes.
39. Dummy	Create a rough folded-paper mock-up of a short brain comic before adding finished drawings. Move a question, diagram, or reveal to test whether a different page arrangement improves pacing.
40. Passion	Ask students which brain question they most want to investigate after reading. Use that genuine curiosity to choose a writing topic, while requiring scientific statements to remain grounded in the text.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute Pace-Write-Read task: 'The Memory Pause.' Minutes 0–4—Revisit a short passage about memory and identify one place where readers need extra thinking time. Minutes 4–7—Students choose a familiar cue, such as a song that reminds them of a celebration, and plan a four-panel comic: encounter the cue, pause, recall an experience, and respond. Explain that this is a simplified account of an experience, not a complete model of memory formation or retrieval. Minutes 7–14—Draw and write the comic, using a short opening caption, a larger memory panel, and a clear final response; K–2 students may dictate or use labels. Minutes 14–18—Partners read the comics and point to where they paused; creators revise one panel’s size, wording, or punctuation to strengthen that effect. Minutes 18–20—Share one revision and finish: 'I slowed my reader down by … so they could understand …' Use paper, pencils, and optional crayons.

Classroom Activities

A Message Through the Brain

Students make a four-panel informational comic showing a simplified journey from noticing a familiar object to remembering something about it and choosing a response. Inspired by the book’s combination of science, visual storytelling, and humor, students vary panel size, text length, and punctuation to help readers speed up or pause. K–2 students may draw and dictate; grades 3–5 add captions and revise their pacing.

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