On the board, I placed some fill in the blank plot review questions which Lena copied into her notebook and completed. This exercise tied into a theme of the novel - how writing ,whether by authors or others, can be a means of coping with pain. I noted how May etches her pain into short messages that she inserts in her own version of the "wailing wall" and how Lily longs to be a writer to give meaning to people's pain. In order to acclimate Lena to writing some sentences I then had Lena write a few sentences in her notebook describing a few things she did yesterday. Last,we continued to read chapter 9, stopping to discuss the context of the vocabulary words and salient plot developments.