This curriculum guide to the novel Benjamin and the Paradise Project is written to assist middle-grade teachers. This guide assumes a teacher-led classroom and focuses exclusively on direct student engagement with the text through reading, writing and discussion. Students work individually, with partners, in small groups, and as a full class to complete activities. This guide supports the idea that the study of literature is important because it gives students practice in making meaningful inferences and supporting those inferences with evidence from the text. Benjamin and the Paradise Project is useful in this regard because it is an idea-rich book. The guide breaks the reading of the novel into fourteen sittings of approximately eighteen pages each. The teaching of the novel is divided into a brief introductory lesson, fourteen instructional lessons, and a lesson of additional writing activities.