SOSE - Sandlot

The Plot

It's 1962, and Scotty Smalls is the new kid in town. He's shy, slightly awkward and doesn't find it easy to fit in with the neighbourhood kids. His mother constantly urges him to go outside and make friends, but it's not as easy as she thinks it is. More than anything else, Scotty wants to play baseball with the other kids. But that's not really an easy task when you don't know how to catch a ball. Scotty even tries to get his stepfather to teach him, but he's too occupied with his work. All that changes when Benjamin Rodriguez, the best ball player in town, invites him to be the ninth player on their team. Benjamin shows Smalls (as he comes to be called) the ropes and teaches him how to catch. Pretty soon Scotty's days of sitting at home by himself are over. And so starts the best summer of his life.


Subplots

Scotty belts a ball over a fence that is guarded by a fierce beast, where no ball is ever recovered. The problem is that Scotty took the ball from his dad, and the ball was signed by Babe Ruth. This leads to numerous confrontations with the beast to try and recover the ball.

In The Sandlot everything is exaggerated and becomes something larger than life. That's the way many adults recall seeing things as a boy or girl. There's a dog that rules over the land of lost baseballs and he's a huge monster of cartoon proportions - the sort of creature that only exists in tales told in sleepovers and backyard camp-outs.


Setting

A quiet town in the USA in 1962.


Drug Education

Tobacco contains nicotine. It can cause lung cancer, heart disease, heart attacks and many other health problems.


Themes

Making new friends after moving to a new area.
Cooperation.
Team building.
Accepting others.
Helping others.
Using technology to achieve a goal.
The world is not as scary as it seems.


Characters

Benjamin Franklin Rodriguez
Scotty Smalls
The Beast
Hamilton 'Ham' Porter
Michael 'Squints' Palledorous
Alan 'Yeah-Yeah' McClennan
Kenny DeNunez (as Brandon Adams)
Bertram Grover Weeks
Tommy 'Repeat' Timmons
Timmy Timmons


Activities

- learn softball skills.
- make the dessert called smores.
- write a campfire legend like the story of The Beast.
- analyse the film The Sandlot.
- for technology, design a ball retriever for when your ball goes over the fence.
- write a word bank and incorporate the words into class writing activities.


Resources

- cooking ingredients
- softball equipment
- DVD The Sandlot
- Smartboard for group technology designs.