A Classroom Kids Want to Be a Part Of

I teach grades 5-12, and I try to make sure my kids aren't doing the same thing over and over and over again each day. Don't get me wrong, we have certain routines we follow daily to keep us on a path, but I am constantly searching for new ways to teach the same old "boring" stuff.

My freshmen have just finished reading "The Most Dangerous Game" and I had deliberately set it up so they had to read it silently and we haven't really talked about it yet. I asked them to take what they understood about the story and set it in a completely different place so they could play with how the setting affects the text - we did talk about that as they were working. I got some interesting stories, and they were all able to see how things would have changed if the story hadn't taken place on a creepy, deserted island.

Today, I had them present their character wallets. I got this idea from the amazing Kelley Gallagher (look him up if you haven't read his stuff, you'll be glad you did). The idea is to create a wallet (or purse, or whatever) and fill it with things the character might carry around. We did wallets because the two main characters were men, and yes we chatted about some of the things they might carry. I suggested Rainsford's wallet would be water logged since he fell off a ship and had to swim to the island, and I got a wet wallet from one student this morning :) As the kids were presenting, they had to explain why they put what they put into the wallets. For Zaroff, several kids had hundreds of dollars because he wouldn't use a credit card - he would be traceable then and in his "game" he wouldn't want anyone to catch him. Several kids gave each a membership card to a hunting club since both characters were big game hunters. One student even had the two as members of the same club, she said it was because Zaroff was Rainsford's stalker (plausible if you know the story). A couple of kids had pictures in the wallets of the men with their first kills, and a couple had newspaper articles they'd created about the person commemorating something important to them. It was cool to see what they had come up with, and their art wasn't anything but scribbles and construction paper for some of it, but it was real.

I asked them how they felt about doing this project and they all seemed to agree that it made the characters more real for them. I love when my kids make connections to texts, and I LOVE when they enjoy doing it at the same time :)

Students of all ages want to be creative and they want to do something in class where they see value, i.e. authenticity. Don't be afraid to throw a crafty project into the mix, you might be surprised how much the kids can actually get from it.