Powwow Day

by Traci Sorell, Marlena Myles

River usually looks forward to dancing at the powwow, but this year she is recovering from an illness and does not have the strength to join in. As she watches her family and community gather, drum, and dance, she discovers that she can still experience connection, support, and hope while her body heals.

Big Idea

Belonging does not depend on what a person can do on a particular day. River’s experience also shows how a writer can contrast lively community action with a character’s quieter inner experience.

Discussion Questions

1.What does River miss about participating in the powwow, and how do the words and illustrations help us understand her feelings?
2.How do River’s family and community help her feel connected even when she cannot dance?
3.Where does the story seem to move quickly, and where does it invite us to slow down? How do those changes help us understand River?
4.What changes for River between the beginning and the ending? What remains unresolved?
5.What can we learn from River’s experience about including someone whose energy, abilities, or needs have changed?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 45 minutes📦 A copy of Powwow Day, paper, pencils, crayons or colored pencils, chart paper or a whiteboard; optional sticky notes.

Learning Goals

Describe River’s feelings and explain how her responses change, using evidence from the words and illustrations.
Explain how sentence length, page turns, and visual details can influence a reader’s sense of pace.
Create a short narrative with a clear situation, a meaningful response, and an ending.
Identify ways a community can support belonging without requiring everyone to participate in the same way.

Activity Steps

1.Read and notice, 10 minutes: Read Powwow Day aloud, allowing time to view the illustrations. Explain that powwows are living community gatherings and that traditions vary among Native nations and communities; use the book’s back matter to ground any additional cultural information.
2.Trace River’s experience, 7 minutes: Make a class chart with three columns: what River wants, what makes participation difficult, and what helps her feel connected. Invite students to distinguish what the book shows from their own inferences.
3.Explore pace, 5 minutes: Revisit a spread emphasizing movement and a spread emphasizing River’s response. Ask how the words, pictures, and read-aloud delivery make each moment feel different.
4.Plan and create, 15 minutes: Students fold paper into three panels: wanting to join, encountering a difficulty, and finding connection. They draw and write an original everyday story, including one active moment and one slower moment of noticing or feeling. K–1 students may dictate or label; grades 2–5 can develop several sentences per panel.
5.Share and revise, 8 minutes: Partners read their narratives aloud and identify a fast moment and a slow moment. Students revise one sentence or illustration, then finish with an explanation of how their character experiences belonging.

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS RL.K.3, RL.1.3, and RL.2.3 — Describe characters and their responses to important events; use prompting and support as appropriate.
ELA: CCSS RL.3.3 and RL.4.3 — Explain characters’ feelings, motivations, and actions using specific story details.
ELA: CCSS RL.5.7 — Analyze how visual elements contribute to a text’s meaning and tone.
ELA: CCSS W.K.3–W.5.3 — Develop grade-appropriate narratives through drawing, dictation, or writing, with sequenced events and relevant details.
SEL: Social awareness and relationship skills — Recognize different participation needs and consider supportive, inclusive responses.

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

In Powwow Day, readers experience two kinds of movement at once: the communal energy of the powwow and the more difficult, inward movement of River’s recovery. Drumming and dancing provide a lively setting, but River cannot simply match that energy. This contrast makes the book a useful mentor text for showing that narrative pace is not just speed. It is the amount of attention a writer gives to an action, a feeling, or a change in understanding. For a Pace-Write-Read study, first read the book for meaning without frequent interruptions. On a second reading, invite students to notice where their eyes move rapidly across an illustration, where a sentence invites a breath, and where River’s experience makes them want to linger. Treat the words, illustrations, and page turns as partners: a quiet passage can carry considerable emotional weight even when little outward action occurs. Students can borrow these craft strategies without borrowing cultural practices. They might write about watching a game while injured, needing rest during a celebration, or finding another role in a group project. Keep discussion grounded in River’s particular story and in the book’s back matter rather than presenting one powwow experience as representative of all Indigenous peoples.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	Compare a passage focused on powwow activity with one focused on River’s physical or emotional response. Ask students how the author and illustrator make room for both movement and reflection.
2. Plot	Map River’s desire to dance, the limitation caused by her recovery, and her growing sense of connection. Emphasize that the central movement is emotional rather than a sudden solution to her illness.
3. Prosody	Read a selected passage twice, changing your pauses and emphasis while keeping the words the same. Discuss which delivery best respects River’s feelings and the activity described, rather than simply reading every powwow scene quickly.
4. Word	Collect a few of the book’s actual words connected to movement, sound, and feeling. Ask students how replacing a precise word with a general one would change the scene’s energy.
5. Concept	Frame the story’s central concept as belonging while temporarily unable to participate in a familiar way. Have students distinguish that underlying idea from the specific events of River’s powwow day.
6. Voice & Worldview	Notice how River’s perspective centers family, community, and her relationship to dancing. Discuss this as a particular Indigenous child’s experience, not a single worldview shared by every Native person.
7. Point of View	River’s first-person narration brings readers close to what she feels and notices. Ask what another family member might observe but could not know directly about River’s inner experience.
8. Setting & Place	Identify details that establish the powwow as a contemporary gathering with people, sound, movement, and relationships. Discuss how this setting intensifies River’s wish to participate.
9. Original Characters	Build a character profile from River’s wishes, frustrations, observations, and relationships rather than defining her only by illness. Students can use the same approach to give their own characters more than one defining trait.
10. Dialogue	Distinguish any spoken exchanges from River’s narration and private responses. Ask how hearing another person’s words changes the pace or helps readers understand a relationship.
11. Details	Find a small detail in the text or art that helps explain why this day matters to River. Ask whether the detail mainly advances action, builds the setting, or deepens emotion.
12. Descriptions	Compare what the text describes with what the pictures supply about the gathering. Invite students to describe one ordinary setting through a few carefully chosen sensory details rather than a long inventory.
13. Firsts	Study the first introduction to River and her situation: what do readers learn immediately, and what do they learn later? Discuss how a familiar event can feel unfamiliar when a character’s circumstances change.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Ask how being close to River’s immediate perceptions makes readers care about what happens next. Have students rewrite a general statement about disappointment as a specific moment of noticing or responding.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Separate moments that unfold before readers from information that briefly explains River’s circumstances. Show how background can remain concise while emotionally important scenes receive more attention.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	The tension grows from the gap between River’s wish to dance and what her body can manage. Track how the story sustains concern without needing a villain or a dangerous adventure.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Notice references to River’s earlier participation and hopes for dancing again; distinguish these from fully dramatized flashbacks or flash-forwards. Discuss how memory and anticipation can deepen a mostly forward-moving story without a cliffhanger.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Because this is a picture book, study page turns rather than chapter breaks. Pause before a selected turn and ask what readers expect, then examine how the next spread develops River’s experience.
19. Pace & Creativity	Invite students to represent the same everyday event in a quick sketch-and-sentence version and a slower, more detailed version. Connect their choices to the book’s differing attention to public activity and private feeling.
20. Play	Use a craft game in which students sort their own sentences into action and reflection categories. Keep the play focused on storytelling rather than turning powwow traditions into pretend classroom entertainment.
21. Performance	Practice a respectful read-aloud that gives River’s quieter responses as much attention as the lively setting. Do not imitate Native accents, songs, drumming, or ceremonial practices.
22. Personality	Ask what River’s attention to dancing and community reveals about what matters to her. Require students to support personality descriptions with a specific action, observation, or response.
23. Humor	Discuss whether humor is a major pacing tool here and allow students to conclude that it is not. Compare the book’s warmth and emotional seriousness with stories that use jokes to release tension.
24. Pause	After an emotionally significant spread, leave a brief silence before discussing it. Ask how that pause allows readers to notice River’s expression, physical experience, or changing feelings.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Examine language linking sound, movement, and bodily feeling, including the relationship between drumming and heartbeat. Discuss the effect of an image or comparison before asking students to name a poetic device.
26. Repetition	Look for recurring words, ideas, or visual motifs connected to dancing, sound, and River’s wish to join. Ask how a return to the same idea can carry a different feeling later in the story.
27. Rhythm	Listen to the rhythm of the prose separately from the drumming represented in the story. Mark natural phrase groups in a short passage and discuss how they shape the reading experience.
28. Punctuation	Choose a sentence from the book and notice how its actual punctuation guides breaths and stopping points. Students can then test how a period or comma changes the delivery of a sentence they wrote.
29. Questions	Track reader questions such as whether River will be able to participate and how she will respond if she cannot. Distinguish these implied questions from any questions explicitly printed in the text.
30. Compare-Contrast	Compare River’s physical stillness with the movement around her, and her earlier expectations with her present experience. Explain how these contrasts make the emotional stakes clear.
31. Objects	Notice how drums, dance clothing, and other visible items establish the setting and connect people to the gathering. Use accurate terms from the book and back matter; refer to regalia as regalia, not costumes.
32. Threes	Use a three-part lens—wanting, difficulty, connection—to summarize River’s emotional journey. Explain that this is a planning tool for readers and writers, not a claim that the book uses a repeated rule-of-three pattern.
33. Lists	Create a class list of what River notices, then discuss why an author selects details rather than including everything. Students can test whether a short list in their own writing builds energy or slows a moment down.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Examine how open areas around text or figures affect where readers look and how long they linger. Compare selected spreads without assuming every quiet moment uses the same visual arrangement.
35. Art & Graphics	Study how color, facial expressions, body positions, and composition add information beyond the words. Ask students to support an interpretation of River’s feelings with both textual and visual evidence.
36. Interactives & Gamification	The book is not a game or choose-your-path story, but readers can interact with it through a pace map. Have students place fast, slow, or mixed markers beside selected spreads and explain their choices.
37. Placement	Notice where River appears within a spread and how her placement relates to the surrounding dancers and gathering. Discuss how the placement of words and images directs attention before the page turn.
38. Form	Discuss how the picture-book form allows a focused account of one important day while pictures carry substantial setting and emotion. Ask what might be lost if the story were reduced to a plot summary.
39. Dummy	Have students fold a sheet into a miniature book dummy and assign one story beat to each spread. Use Powwow Day to discuss why a writer might reserve a full spread for an emotionally important moment.
40. Passion	River’s attachment to dancing makes her inability to join especially meaningful. Invite students to write about an activity or community they care about, showing that attachment through specific details rather than merely stating that it matters.

Pace-Write It!

Fast Around Me, Slow Inside — 20 minutes Materials: Powwow Day, paper, pencils, and crayons. 1. Notice, 4 minutes: Revisit one spread emphasizing powwow movement and one emphasizing River’s response. Ask: What is happening around River? What is happening within her? Explain that external action and internal feeling can move at different speeds. 2. Plan, 3 minutes: Students choose a familiar, nonceremonial situation in which a character wants to participate but needs rest, help, or another role. They fold paper into two sections labeled Around Me and Inside Me; students need not disclose personal medical experiences. 3. Pace-write, 7 minutes: In Around Me, students draw or write the active surroundings using specific action words. In Inside Me, they slow down to describe one sensation, thought, or feeling, then add a final line showing a supportive connection without requiring the difficulty to disappear. K–1 students may draw, label, or dictate; older students can vary sentence length and detail deliberately. 4. Read and test, 4 minutes: Partners read the pieces aloud and identify where the pace changes. Writers revise one word, sentence, or visual detail to make the contrast clearer; remind them that short sentences can feel quick or emphatic depending on context. 5. Reflect, 2 minutes: Students complete: Like River’s story, my writing slows down when ____. Close by naming how the character remains included without having to perform the same activity as everyone else.

Classroom Activities

A Moment of Belonging

Students create a three-panel illustrated narrative about a character who wants to join a familiar activity but needs another way to participate. Inspired by the contrast between the powwow’s movement and River’s quiet experience, students make one panel feel active and another feel reflective through sentence length, details, and drawing choices. Students use an everyday setting they know rather than inventing Indigenous ceremonies or reproducing regalia.

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