Chronically Dolores

by Maya Van Wagenen

Important selection note: Chronically Dolores is a young adult novel, not a picture book, and its adolescent content makes it a poor fit for a general K–5 read-aloud; the activities below use teacher-screened excerpts or an age-appropriate teacher-created synopsis for grades 4–5. Fourteen-year-old Dolores Mendoza is navigating a painful chronic bladder condition and the fallout from a broken friendship when she meets Terpsichore, an autistic girl seeking greater independence. Their agreement to help solve each other’s problems becomes a complicated exploration of friendship, identity, and the limits of trying to fix another person’s life.

Big Idea

Friendship grows through listening, respecting boundaries, and recognizing people as more than their diagnoses. Writers can use changes in narrative speed to show the difference between what a character wants and what that character actually needs.

Discussion Questions

1.Dolores wants her life and friendships to feel different. How can a strong wish influence the choices someone makes?
2.Dolores and Terpsichore initially agree to help each other achieve particular goals. What makes helping different from deciding what is best for someone else?
3.How can a story help readers understand an illness they cannot see without suggesting that every person with that illness has the same experience?
4.What might Dolores and Terpsichore learn by listening to each other rather than making assumptions?
5.Which kinds of moments deserve a slow, detailed scene: an argument, an uncomfortable silence, a discovery, or something else? Explain your choice.

Classroom Activity

A Friendship Moment in Two Speeds

After hearing a teacher-created synopsis of Dolores and Terpsichore’s friendship, students create a four-panel fictional scene in which one friend makes an assumption and then pauses to listen. They summarize the setup quickly, stretch the listening moment with dialogue and observable details, and finish with a respectful next step. This is a craft activity, not a simulation of chronic illness or autism.

Lesson Plan

⏱ 45 minutes; designed for grades 4–5 with adaptation. For K–3, use a developmentally appropriate picture book about friendship and access instead of this novel.📦 Teacher-created synopsis, optional teacher-screened excerpt from a legally obtained copy, paper, pencils, crayons or markers, and a board or chart paper

Learning Goals

Explain how Dolores and Terpsichore’s goals and choices contribute to the novel’s friendship conflict.
Distinguish a brief narrative summary from a developed scene.
Use dialogue, actions, and selected details to slow an important moment.
Develop a fictional interaction that demonstrates listening, consent, and respect for boundaries.

Activity Steps

1.Introduce the book accurately as a YA novel. Share a teacher-created, age-appropriate synopsis focused on Dolores’s chronic illness, Terpsichore’s desire for independence, and their agreement to help each other.
2.Discuss the difference between asking what someone needs and assuming what they need. Explain that no student must disclose a diagnosis, illness, or personal friendship difficulty.
3.Model two versions of an invented friendship moment: a one-sentence summary and a short scene with dialogue, an action, and a pause. Label both as teacher-written examples, not passages from the novel.
4.Have students fold paper into four panels labeled Setup, Assumption, Listening Pause, and Next Step. Students invent their own characters rather than attempting to imitate either character’s medical or autistic experience.
5.Students write and illustrate their scenes, using the most space and detail for the listening pause. Invite partners to identify where the story speeds up and slows down.
6.Ask students to revise one line to make the interaction more respectful, then complete an exit ticket explaining one pacing choice.

Standards Connections

ELA: RL.4.3 — Describe a character, setting, or event in depth using specific details from the text; apply when using a screened excerpt.
ELA: RL.5.3 — Compare and contrast characters, settings, or events using specific details; apply to Dolores and Terpsichore through suitable excerpts.
ELA: W.4.3 / W.5.3 — Write narratives using effective techniques, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.
ELA: SL.4.1 / SL.5.1 — Participate effectively in collaborative discussions and build on others’ ideas.
SEL: Social awareness and relationship skills — Practice perspective-taking, respectful communication, and recognition of personal boundaries.

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

Chronically Dolores offers a study of pacing through the intersection of adolescent friendship and chronic illness. Dolores’s urgent wish to change her circumstances creates forward momentum, while pain, uncertainty, and difficult interactions give a writer reasons to slow down. For grades 4–5, teach this contrast through an age-appropriate synopsis and carefully screened passages rather than assigning the full YA novel; the synopsis supports discussion of themes, while actual excerpts are needed to analyze the author’s language. The friendship between Dolores and Terpsichore also helps students distinguish an external goal from an internal change. Their agreement supplies a clear story engine: each hopes the other can help her get something she wants. Students can examine how a scene’s dialogue, actions, and pauses reveal complications that a quick plot summary would miss. Avoid treating either chronic illness or autism as a problem friendship must cure. In the Pace-Write-Read workshop, students first notice a craft choice, then try it in an original scene, and finally read their writing aloud to test its effect. The goal is not to copy an autistic voice or imagine symptoms on demand, but to practice moving quickly through background information and slowing down when listening or a consequential choice matters.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	In a screened passage, compare the space given to an event with the time that event would take. Ask how Dolores’s urgent goals and moments of discomfort or uncertainty create different reading speeds.
2. Plot	Map the central agreement: Dolores and Terpsichore intend to help each other achieve their goals. Discuss how such a bargain creates expectations and opportunities for conflict.
3. Prosody	Read a suitable passage aloud twice, changing pauses and emphasis. Ask which reading better communicates Dolores’s attitude without exaggerating pain or performing an autistic stereotype.
4. Word	Select a few words from an actual excerpt that communicate urgency, frustration, or uncertainty. Test how replacing one word changes the emotional pace.
5. Concept	Distinguish the plot concept—two girls agreeing to help each other—from the deeper question of what supportive friendship requires. Have students express each in one sentence.
6. Voice & Worldview	Notice how Dolores’s narrative voice reflects what she wants and how she interprets other people. Ask students to separate her interpretation from facts the passage establishes.
7. Point of View	Examine how the novel’s focus on Dolores shapes readers’ access to Terpsichore. What can Dolores observe, and what would she need to ask rather than assume?
8. Setting & Place	Use a selected passage to identify where an interaction occurs and what that location permits or limits. Connect setting to privacy, comfort, and independence rather than treating place as background decoration.
9. Original Characters	Describe Dolores and Terpsichore through goals, choices, interests, and relationships as well as diagnoses. Students then give an original character several traits so no single label defines that person.
10. Dialogue	Choose a suitable exchange and identify what each girl wants from the conversation. Notice whether brief replies accelerate the interaction or a longer response makes readers stop and reconsider.
11. Details	Locate an action or concrete detail that makes a friendship interaction understandable. Ask why that detail is more effective than simply stating that someone is upset.
12. Descriptions	Examine how a screened description directs attention to Dolores’s experience. Discuss how selected details can communicate discomfort without reducing a character to suffering.
13. Firsts	Examine the girls’ initial meeting or the introduction of their agreement in an appropriate excerpt. Ask what readers learn immediately and what remains unknown.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Identify a moment when readers closely follow Dolores’s immediate concern. Show how a specific goal or unresolved interaction can engage readers without requiring dramatic action.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Contrast a dramatized exchange with a paragraph that covers background or elapsed time. Explain why the friendship bargain needs both efficient context and developed scenes.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Ask what might go wrong when each girl expects the other to help produce a particular outcome. Distinguish uncertainty about a relationship from suspense about physical danger.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Look for references to Dolores’s earlier friendship rupture and distinguish remembered background from a fully dramatized flashback. Identify flash-forwards or cliffhangers only if they actually occur in the selected text.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Inspect an actual chapter ending and ask what question encourages readers to continue. Explain that this is a novel: page turns vary by edition and do not function like fixed picture-book spreads.
19. Pace & Creativity	Invite students to rewrite an invented friendship interaction as both a fast summary and a slow scene. Connect their choices to the novel’s balance between pursuing goals and understanding another person.
20. Play	Use movable sentence strips to experiment with the order of an original conversation. Keep the play focused on narrative structure, never on pretending to have Dolores’s illness or Terpsichore’s autism.
21. Performance	Partners may read a screened dialogue passage with attention to intention and pauses. Do not ask students to imitate symptoms, mannerisms, or a supposedly universal autistic speaking style.
22. Personality	Identify choices that show how Dolores and Terpsichore differ as individuals. Ask how those differences influence the pace and direction of a conversation.
23. Humor	Where a suitable excerpt uses Dolores’s humor, examine whether it expresses personality, deflects discomfort, or changes the mood. Distinguish humor in a character’s voice from laughing at illness or disability.
24. Pause	Find a moment of hesitation or reflection in a selected interaction. Have students add a respectful listening pause to an original scene and explain how it changes the reader’s expectations.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Search an actual excerpt for imagery, comparison, or patterned sounds, without assuming the novel is written in verse. Discuss how any device found concentrates attention on a feeling or experience.
26. Repetition	Track repeated concerns or language about Dolores’s goals across screened selections. Ask whether each recurrence reinforces her priorities or reveals a change in her thinking.
27. Rhythm	Compare sentence lengths in a suitable reflective passage and a dialogue exchange. Read aloud to test how those patterns affect speed and emotional pressure.
28. Punctuation	Examine the punctuation actually present in a selected conversation. Test how changing a period to a question mark alters meaning, while distinguishing punctuation from a required performance instruction.
29. Questions	Separate questions characters ask aloud from questions readers carry about the friendship agreement. Students practice writing a question that invites another person’s perspective instead of assuming it.
30. Compare-Contrast	Compare Dolores’s desire to repair a friendship with Terpsichore’s desire for greater independence. Ask how different goals can bring people together while also causing misunderstandings.
31. Objects	If a screened scene includes an important object, examine how characters use it and whether it affects the interaction. Do not invent a symbolic prop or imply that an ordinary item has significance without textual support.
32. Threes	Check a selected passage for a genuine three-part list or pattern rather than assuming one exists. As a transfer exercise, students can build a three-beat original scene: assumption, pause, response.
33. Lists	Have students list each girl’s wants and compare those wants with what respectful support might involve. Treat this as a planning tool, not a claim that the novel uses a list-based format.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Inspect paragraph spacing and any scene breaks in the edition being used. Discuss how those gaps offer a pause; do not analyze illustrated negative space as though this were a picture book.
35. Art & Graphics	This is not an illustrated picture-book narrative; use the cover only for a separate discussion of design and expectations. Students’ storyboards are adaptations of craft ideas, not reproductions of interior artwork.
36. Interactives & Gamification	Create a teacher-designed sorting challenge in which students label original sentences as summary, dialogue, action, or reflection. Explain that this interaction is a workshop device, not a feature of the novel.
37. Placement	Notice when readers receive information about Dolores’s illness and the friendship conflict. Ask how placing an explanation before or after an interaction changes the way readers interpret it.
38. Form	Identify the book as a prose YA novel and consider how its extended form allows friendship and self-understanding to develop over time. Compare that capacity with the tighter compression of a picture book.
39. Dummy	Students can make a four-panel planning dummy for their own friendship scene. Explain that the dummy is a classroom drafting tool, not evidence that Van Wagenen composed this novel as a picture book.
40. Passion	Discuss how the story gives sustained attention to chronic illness, autonomy, and complicated friendship. Students choose a relationship value they care about and reveal it through a character’s action rather than a concluding lecture.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute task — The Agreement Meets a Listening Pause. Minutes 0–3: Share a teacher-created synopsis explaining that Dolores and Terpsichore make an agreement to help one another, while their goals and needs are not identical. Minutes 3–6: Model an invented sentence, 'They made a plan to help each other,' then expand one moment into dialogue that includes the question, 'What kind of help do you want?' Clarify that this is not a quotation from the novel. Minutes 6–13: Students write a six- to eight-sentence scene about two original friends making a plan: one sentence of quick setup, several sentences of dialogue and action that slow a misunderstanding, and a final respectful next step. Minutes 13–17: Partners read their scenes aloud and mark the point where the pace slows; writers revise one detail or pause. Minutes 17–20: Invite brief sharing and an exit response: 'I slowed this moment because…' Keep participation accessible through drawing, dictation, or writing, and require no personal health disclosures.