You can find many fast activities online. To begin, click here.

Here are some practical things that I try to do to make my activities effective:

For learning:

• Clear instructions
• Clear time limit given for the task
• Clear statement of purpose / learning goal
• Collect formative assessment through notes or stats
• All students should be given the chance to do the activity — so anyone who plays pictionary should do so in small groups rather than as a class.

For management and motivation:

• Strong transitions
• Strong teacher presence in the classroom
• Use activities that speak to many skills (reading, writing, visual representation, etc.)
• Return to previous activities
• Create rapport by circulating

For a longer-lasting impact:

• Students should share what they produce with each other
• Students should reflect on what they have done
• All activities should be closed with a clear restatement of purpose

On the whole, I find that having a wide range of activities adds pace and energy to my lessons.

Categories of Objectives/ Standards:

• Reading
• Writing
• Speaking
• Listening
• Media Literacy
• Research

So to this end, I picked objectives that went alongside each of these categories. Then I decided how to assess each of them. Then I worked on building skills for each of them. Often, the way I taught content was to have student interact with the text in skill building activities.

For example:

Goal: Speaking – Students will speak with dynamism using an image that enhances rather than distracts from the speaker’s presence.

Task: Present one image to the text that summarizes the message of The Crucible.

To do this, the student is required to interact with the text, but my feedback to them will primarily be on their presentation speaking goals.

Reflection:

Normally, I’d prefer to really go after the student’s discussion of content in my feedback. I shifted that discussion to the time when the students were choosing their image. Since we did more than one skill-based activity like this, I found student interpretation and analysis grew in response to the activities that we’d done.

It was as though they were learning.

(I patched this together from literacy circles and a book club presentation I attended at the EARCOS Teachers Conference.)

The Process So Far

We began by building background knowledge, interacting with photos, videos, and articles. At this point, we focused on identifying and summarizing important information.

When we began to read our novels, we began marking the text to identify important information and then summarized the text in bullet points at the start of each chapter. I modeled this, then the class worked in pairs, and then moved to individually going through this process. Compared to double-entry journals, this is a speedy process of recording personal response.

We then used our chapter summaries to begin generating group discussion. Because the students have read the text and identified the important information, they suddenly find that they have something to say about the books they’re reading.

The discussions have gotten better over the course of this week, especially after we worked on verbal and non-verbal strategies for creating an effective conversation. We also spent time thinking about what we thought made effective discussion of literature.

We’ve spent two weeks on this process, as recorded here. It has taken us through the exposition and much of the rising action. It has allowed us to build comprehension and identify conflicts. We’ll explore them in more detail next week.

Review

Though it’s May, my class is full of energy. Better yet, that energy is focused on the text we’re critically reading. Very few students are falling behind in their reading.

For many of my students, this is the first time that they have had something to say about a book beyond “it’s good” or “it’s nice.”

The thing is, the reason the students think so highly of the class is that learned through unusual activities and reflection in September. That first impression created an association at the start of the course that has kept students invested in learning.

Motivation in the bank.

Now, we’re working on small details, things that don’t come so quickly. The pace is slower, and it’s not the best time of the year to observe.

For example, we spent half an hour expressing comparison-contrast analysis of Romeo and Juliet and “Romeo and Juliet in Bosnia” in compound and complex sentences yesterday. The students were willing to engage in the process, even though my sales pitch was “Now we’re going to try to express comparison-contrast analysis in single sentences!”

I’m cashing in on the trust and the motivation that I banked at the start of the year.

(For the record, that sentence-writing activity was productive. We began with simple comparisons, moved to plot/ character comparisons, and ended with text-to-text comparisons. There was a ton of 1:1 teacher-student interaction during the activity, which drove the process and produced learning.)

I started the class discussing “random” (the slang usage). We shared some “that was so random” moments (my random moment was the ending of Ong-Bak 2). From there we made a list of random words and then tried to explain how Romeo, fate, or tragedy could be connected to a watermelon, a computer, and “WHAT?”

The challenge: We made a list of Romeo and Juliet ideas, characters, and quotes. I drew three circles on the white board and asked if anyone could come up with three words that I couldn’t link together, which hooked the class while modeling how the activity is done.

The students then took up the challenge with three circles, then five, and finally nine.

I used this activity to help students collate and consolidate our ground work on Romeo and Juliet before moving on to essays, projects, and tests.

I was taught this activity back in university. Some readers may know it by another name, though Juliet would be quick to remind us that the activity’s more important than the name.