Night of the Twisters by: Ivy Ruckman (Chapter Realistic Fiction)

Night of the Twisters takes place in Blainsworth, Nebraska where Dan Hatch lives with his stepfather Jack, mother Laura, and half-brother Ryan.  Dan is always trying to impress his stepfather and tries to show him how responsible he is.  Dan has always been interested in art and becoming an artist, but Jack has always tried to force sports on Dan.  The book starts off with  Bob Iverson, a storm chaser, arriving in Blainsworth tracking a massive storm that is about to hit the town.  One day, Jack comes home to watch television, when he is interrupted by a severe weather warning announcement about a tornado that is approximately 14 miles way from Blainsworth.  Once Jack leaves the house, Dan, his best friend Arthur and his baby brother Ryan are left alone in the house.  They immediately run to the basement for shelter and listen to the horrible sounds of the tornado coming ahead.  The story continues with Dan and Arthur taking control and leaving the house to go find their families.  Dan's mother and Aunt Jenny, are stuck inside a nearby diner the entire time this is going on.  Dan and Arthur finally find Jack under a pile of power lines, next to his turned over truck.  Dan quickly runs to his step father and pulls him out from under the power lines, hoping this would show Jack how reliable and responsible Dan really is.  Jack only replies with a thank you and rushes all of them to go save Dan's grandmother, Bess, on her farm.  After they save the grandmother, Jack, Dan, Arthur, Ryan, and Ryan's sister Stacey leave the emergency shelter that they brought the grandmother to to go find Laura.  Just as Jack and all of them pulled into the driveway, Jenny, Bob, and Laura pull up at the same time and all of the families are reunited.  Just as they were reuniting, the tornado begins to reach down and they all make a run for it and hide under the overpass.  The tornado nearly sucks Dan in, but he gets to the overpass as well.  Finally when the tornado ended, they all came out from under the overpass and Dan tells everyone that he is dating Arthur's sister, Stacey.

I would use this story as a way to have the students feel the affects of a natural disaster, such as a tornado.  Being that this story is based off of the 1980 series of tornadoes in a Nebraska town, I would give them a background of those tornadoes before I read the book so they can compare the real life disaster to the fictional book outlook on the tornado.  They can make a chart to keep track of the order of the events that happened in the book.  They can also make a Venn diagram comparing and contrasting the 1980 tornadoes and the tornado in the story.