I always try to find new ways to inspire my students. That is why I have chosen to include more video-based lessons in my curriculum. Since I started using TED talks, short videos and TV shows, they have literally transformed my ESL classes. My students pay more attention in class and their performance is a lot better because they are obviously more willing to complete classwork that is interesting and they can relate to. Although I do not use these authentic materials to simply entertain my stu
Presentation and strategy are everything when you’re introducing a novel to your class, especially if you have a few (or more) resistant readers in the mix. That is why it is important to introduce a novel in an exciting and engaging way!
Are you looking for engaging YA adult books for your ESL learners? Here is a list of my favourite novels to read with high school students.
10 ideas for planning engaging novel units: creative, engaging lesson ideas for your next whole-class novel unit
What must-teach novels do you have in your ELA classroom? These six novels will get your students thinking and start important discussions.
Getting the ELA classroom just right can be tricky. This series of blog posts helps teachers in making the most of teaching ELA!
Are you looking for engaging YA adult books for your ESL learners? Here is a list of my favourite novels to read with high school students.
What are sketchnotes? Sketchnotes are becoming an increasingly popular way for students to take notes for lectures. However, there is much value to be gained from using them along with – or instead of – traditional methods like Cornell notes and annotation. Studies have shown that engaging the visual part of the brain as ... Read more
A book is a dream that you hold in your hands. ~ Neil Gaiman March is National Reading month, one of my favorites! Not only is the dreary winter weather...
Are you looking for engaging YA adult books for your ESL learners? Here is a list of my favourite novels to read with high school students.
11 of the best short stories to teach in middle school. Stories with good moral lessons and plans to help you teach them!
Satire is a difficult concept to teach. With these 3 simple strategies, teachers can engage students in analyzing satire.
Discuss allegory in The Crucible by Arthur Miller with this lesson plan at ❰StoryboardThat❱ ✩. Also includes student activities for plot, themes, & character analysis.
Quick setting activities for any novel or short story. You can implement many of these ideas without tons of prep. Plus, many will reach different learners.
Needing short story unit ideas for middle or high school classes? Read about how you can differentiate, provide choice, and meet standards.
Teaching with graphic novels is the perfect strategy for engaging reluctant readers. Use these tips to get started today!
We all know the struggle of spending hours prepping a creative, engaging lesson for your favorite novel, only to get to class to find out half of your students didn’t even read the assigned chapter…
The Hunger Games Lesson Plan Ideas: engaging and easy to implement activities for this famous dystopian novel. Free downloads!
There are many benefits to using movie trailers as an alternative assessment in English class. The main one: students genuinely enjoy them!
By The Daring English Teacher When teaching a novel, I love to mix things up and throw in a fun, creative, or collaborative activity that engages students as they analyze and interpret the novel’s theme, characters, symbols, or conflict. This allows me to enhance my students’ understanding of the novel, and it gives them a break from the day-to-day routine of reading and reviewing that often accompanies novel studies. Providing students with fun and engaging, yet still rigorous, activities enhances their understanding and fosters a love of reading. Here are three fun activities that you can easily incorporate into any novel study. This is one of my favorite, go-to collaborative activities. Collaborative posters are a great way to review key concepts, analyze symbols and motifs, and brainstorm for essays, and they require little planning. Before class starts, write one character, symbol, setting, motif, or element from the novel in pencil in the corner of each paper. When class begins, have students form groups of 2-4 students, and provide each group with one of the pieces of paper. Then, instruct your students to record the item, information, and quotes from the book on the poster. For this assignment, you can focus on the author’s use of symbols within the novel. You will select a variety of symbols in the novel and assign the symbols to different groups. It is okay if multiple groups are assigned the same symbol. Instruct each group to title their poster with the symbol, write as many details about the symbol as they can think about (this includes what it stands for), and record up to two different quotes illustrating how the author uses the symbol in the novel. I recently did this activity with my Romeo and Juliet unit, and it was a hit. The students were prepared for their essays, and they developed a deeper understanding for the play. Once students are done with the posters, display them throughout the classroom and have the students complete a gallery walk recording the information. This activity is great because it requires students to analyze their assigned topic, while at the same time reinforcing the importance of collaborative work. Even better, this activity gets students up and moving! As an alternative to making posters, this assignment also works very well with post-it notes. Simply provide your student groups with multiple post-it notes, and have the groups write information on the post-its. Then, have students post the notes on the board for the gallery walk. This option is especially beneficial when you want to have a gallery walk, but do not have the time for making posters in the classroom. You can also read about collaborative brainstorming ideas in this blog post. A fun and creative character analysis project you can complete in your classroom is a mock job fair in your classroom. To prepare for this activity, students either select or are assigned a character from the novel. They assume the role of this character and create a resume for this character listing strengths, accomplishments, and skills. To prepare for this activity, I usually teach students about resume writing, provide them with a list of power verbs, and give them a resume template. After students create their resumes, I host a mock job fair in my classroom for one day. During the mock job fair students are assigned to one of two groups, and the groups rotate between interviewer and interviewee. The students assigned to the interview role are given a set of interview questions to ask their candidate. As the candidate responds, the interviewer records the responses. After the interview is over, the students switch roles. This is one of my favorite activities for my Of Mice and Men unit because the students get to explore the characters on a deeper level. Once the activity is over, students write a brief argument piece about whether they would hire that character for the job. After I read an essential chapter with my students, I like to take a day or two to reflect on the reading, analyze what happened, and make sure that my students understand the importance of what they just read, and a creative comic strip assignment is ideal for this. One of the best times to assign this activity is right after a major conflict or at the peak of the story so that students can really analyze the novel's conflict. I like doing this activity with my students when we read Fahrenheit 451 because it helps them understand the conflict more. When assigning a comic strip assignment, make sure students focus on more than just drawing pictures by requiring them to include quotes from the novel as their dialogue. In addition to quotes, students should also write narration, cite their quotes in MLA format, and dedicate an entire box to the novel’s conflict. You can download this FREE, EXCLUSIVE resource to use in your classroom with your next novel study! For more fun, yet rigorous, activities that you can use with any novel study, check out my Novel Unit. This resource is 99 pages and is filled so many activities that you can use them throughout the year for multiple novel studies. From introductory activities to use before reading, to differentiated writing prompts with built-in scaffolding to use as you read, to post-reading cumulative assignments, and everything in between, this novel unit is my go-to resource when I'm in a pinch and need an activity. Click HERE to check out this resource. Here are some additional resources to help you teach the novel! The SuperHERO Teacher - Workbook for Any Novel Unit Study Grades 7-12 Addie Williams - Novel Study Package - Use with ANY NOVEL Presto Plans - Assignments for Any Novel or Short Story Secondary Sara - Chapter Study Guides: Student-Made Activity for ANY Novel
Are you looking for a creative but low-prep project idea for your novel study unit? Then, keep on reading.I had been brainstorming engaging final project ideas for my grade 9 ESL learners to wrap up our novel study unit on Restart by Gordon Korman, but I realized that I would have neither the energy nor the time to prepare a project booklet for them. So, as an alternative assessment idea, I decided to have my learners prepare a gamified quiz for the novel they read in class. This activity may b
After teaching for ten years and then switching schools, I was very quickly reminded of how much work goes into writing curriculum from scratch. For a long time, I was in a happy place of continual revision of curriculum that I liked, but was tweaking here and there for relevance, rigor, and for fun
Looking for an alternative to the essay? Try an infographic!
This comic provides teachers with a fun and entertaining way to teach or review parallel structure. A worksheet with answer key follows. This comic is part of a larger set entitled Grammar Comics: Sentence Problems." Look for it in my store! If you like this resource, you might be interested in these: Parts of Speech: Grammar Bundle Sentence Problems (Common Writing Mistakes) Middle School Language Arts Bundle Vocabulary Cartoons: Roots and Affixes Poetry Comics Bundle Hamlet: Comic Summaries and Activities A Midsummer Night's Dream: Comic Summaries and Activities Macbeth: Comic Summaries and Activities Romeo and Juliet: Comic Summaries and Actvities Romeo and Juliet: Comic Summaries and Actvities Intro to Shakespeare Activity Bundle Connect with Me! Visit my Teachers Pay Teachers Store Visit my Blog Follow me on Facebook Thanks, David Rickert © David Rickert All rights reserved by author. Duplication limited to single classroom use only. Electronic distribution limited to single classroom use only.
Here are some engaging novel activities for middle school ELA and high school English that will help make in-class readings more fun. These unique activities
Paired passages in action! Why should I be teaching paired passages? Let's face it--paired passages are becoming the norm on standardized tests, so students need a chance to practice reading and responding to them. The SAT
Do you have a hard time deciding what to include, or how much to include, whenever you are beginning a new novel study? These
A variety of lesson plans for the novel The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton — Complete Novel Study, Unit Plan Bundle.
If you're teaching 1984 by George Orwell, this blog post provides lesson plans and activities to connect your 1984 unit to the real world.
Here are the lesson plans we have created for this unit for Week 1. Lesson Plan 1 Standards: Reading Standard 9.5: Analyze how a...
By The Daring English Teacher When teaching a novel, I love to mix things up and throw in a fun, creative, or collaborative activity that engages students as they analyze and interpret the novel’s theme, characters, symbols, or conflict. This allows me to enhance my students’ understanding of the novel, and it gives them a break from the day-to-day routine of reading and reviewing that often accompanies novel studies. Providing students with fun and engaging, yet still rigorous, activities enhances their understanding and fosters a love of reading. Here are three fun activities that you can easily incorporate into any novel study. This is one of my favorite, go-to collaborative activities. Collaborative posters are a great way to review key concepts, analyze symbols and motifs, and brainstorm for essays, and they require little planning. Before class starts, write one character, symbol, setting, motif, or element from the novel in pencil in the corner of each paper. When class begins, have students form groups of 2-4 students, and provide each group with one of the pieces of paper. Then, instruct your students to record the item, information, and quotes from the book on the poster. For this assignment, you can focus on the author’s use of symbols within the novel. You will select a variety of symbols in the novel and assign the symbols to different groups. It is okay if multiple groups are assigned the same symbol. Instruct each group to title their poster with the symbol, write as many details about the symbol as they can think about (this includes what it stands for), and record up to two different quotes illustrating how the author uses the symbol in the novel. I recently did this activity with my Romeo and Juliet unit, and it was a hit. The students were prepared for their essays, and they developed a deeper understanding for the play. Once students are done with the posters, display them throughout the classroom and have the students complete a gallery walk recording the information. This activity is great because it requires students to analyze their assigned topic, while at the same time reinforcing the importance of collaborative work. Even better, this activity gets students up and moving! As an alternative to making posters, this assignment also works very well with post-it notes. Simply provide your student groups with multiple post-it notes, and have the groups write information on the post-its. Then, have students post the notes on the board for the gallery walk. This option is especially beneficial when you want to have a gallery walk, but do not have the time for making posters in the classroom. You can also read about collaborative brainstorming ideas in this blog post. A fun and creative character analysis project you can complete in your classroom is a mock job fair in your classroom. To prepare for this activity, students either select or are assigned a character from the novel. They assume the role of this character and create a resume for this character listing strengths, accomplishments, and skills. To prepare for this activity, I usually teach students about resume writing, provide them with a list of power verbs, and give them a resume template. After students create their resumes, I host a mock job fair in my classroom for one day. During the mock job fair students are assigned to one of two groups, and the groups rotate between interviewer and interviewee. The students assigned to the interview role are given a set of interview questions to ask their candidate. As the candidate responds, the interviewer records the responses. After the interview is over, the students switch roles. This is one of my favorite activities for my Of Mice and Men unit because the students get to explore the characters on a deeper level. Once the activity is over, students write a brief argument piece about whether they would hire that character for the job. After I read an essential chapter with my students, I like to take a day or two to reflect on the reading, analyze what happened, and make sure that my students understand the importance of what they just read, and a creative comic strip assignment is ideal for this. One of the best times to assign this activity is right after a major conflict or at the peak of the story so that students can really analyze the novel's conflict. I like doing this activity with my students when we read Fahrenheit 451 because it helps them understand the conflict more. When assigning a comic strip assignment, make sure students focus on more than just drawing pictures by requiring them to include quotes from the novel as their dialogue. In addition to quotes, students should also write narration, cite their quotes in MLA format, and dedicate an entire box to the novel’s conflict. You can download this FREE, EXCLUSIVE resource to use in your classroom with your next novel study! For more fun, yet rigorous, activities that you can use with any novel study, check out my Novel Unit. This resource is 99 pages and is filled so many activities that you can use them throughout the year for multiple novel studies. From introductory activities to use before reading, to differentiated writing prompts with built-in scaffolding to use as you read, to post-reading cumulative assignments, and everything in between, this novel unit is my go-to resource when I'm in a pinch and need an activity. Click HERE to check out this resource. Here are some additional resources to help you teach the novel! The SuperHERO Teacher - Workbook for Any Novel Unit Study Grades 7-12 Addie Williams - Novel Study Package - Use with ANY NOVEL Presto Plans - Assignments for Any Novel or Short Story Secondary Sara - Chapter Study Guides: Student-Made Activity for ANY Novel
Are you looking for a creative but low-prep project idea for your novel study unit? Then, keep on reading.I had been brainstorming engaging final project ideas for my grade 9 ESL learners to wrap up our novel study unit on Restart by Gordon Korman, but I realized that I would have neither the energy nor the time to prepare a project booklet for them. So, as an alternative assessment idea, I decided to have my learners prepare a gamified quiz for the novel they read in class. This activity may b
You might be wondering how to facilitate virtual learning circles. In this blog post, I'll share apps that work best for online book clubs.
The following board contains a series of activities that the students can choose to do after reading a novel or a short story. Students take on a number of roles, such as detective, journalist, des…
When teaching a novel, there are a lot of different ways to incorporate other texts so your students can understand the novel and the characters’ motivations.
Teaching symbolism for literary analysis: symbolism is throughout literature and once students understand the concept, they appreciate reading more.
This blog post explores innovative and engaging lesson plans for any novel unit... ranging from task cards to book instagram pages to a novel podcast project. Student choice is key here, and students can find something they would like to complete in order to convey their reading, comprehension, and
If you're teaching 1984 by George Orwell, this blog post provides lesson plans and activities to connect your 1984 unit to the real world.
So many project options! I love giving students lots of choices to showcase their learning. Check out this graphic for lots of ideas on how to assess student understanding and comprehension of any novel. What would you add to this list? #bespokeela #2ndaryela #EdChat
16 pre-reading questions to use with any novel! This novel
Beowulf is a challenging text: it's long, dense, and old. With these strategies, you can make this text relevant for all students!
