To culminate a unit on The Art of Racing in the Rain, my 9th graders write an "iSearch" paper in which they track the history, origin, and development/evolution of a single word across many different sources and mediums.
Students must investigate the origins of an abstract noun (such as "friendship" or "loyalty"), and then track this word's usage throughout various sources including the novel itself, the Shakespearean concordance, Concordance to the Bible, poetry, nonfiction, and others.
Stu