Whether you substitute teach or have your own classes, you can never have too many quick activities and assignments on hand to fill the gaps that sometimes arise.
Here are 11 good ones that will fit well with The Giver, but can also be used with any novel, play, or short story.
And if you really want to save time and reduce your workload, download this full unit plan for The Giver and enjoy stress-free teaching for weeks.
1. Create a Quiz
Students create a quiz for the novel, short story, or play being studied.
They can use an online quiz-making site like quizyourfriends.com, or do it the old-fashioned way with pen and paper.
2. Character Horoscope
Students write a horoscope fortune for one of the characters in the text.
The horoscope should fit with the character’s personality and experiences in the story.
3. Create a Wordle
Students use wordle.com to create a piece of text art that represents important characters, events, and themes from the text.
4. Write an Epilogue
Students write an epilogue describing what happens to each of the important characters after the story ends.
5. News Article
Students pretend to be journalists and write a newspaper article describing important events from the story.
They should read a few newspaper articles to get a feel for the style of writing and try to mimic it.
You can also ask them to include quotes from witnesses and experts, and an image.
6. Movie Poster
Students imagine the story has been made into a movie and create a movie poster to promote it.
The poster should resemble real ones, with exciting images, quotes from movie critics, and the name of the star(s).
7. Character Trading Cards
Students create character cards (like baseball cards) that demonstrate their understanding of an important character from the text.
They can use the online Character Trading Card Generator at ReadThinkWrite.org, or do it the old-fashioned way with pen and paper.
8. Status Updates
Students create a series of facebook-style status updates written from the perspective of an important character in the story.
The updates should show an understanding of the character’s voice, and of the important events in the story.
9. Postcard
Students write a postcard from one character in the story to another.
They should consider where the postcard should be from, what the image should be, and what the character might say to the other.
10. One-Sentence Story
Students summarize the entire story in one sentence.
You can limit the length of the sentence to force them to boil the story down to it’s core, or have them write absurdly long sentences covering all the important details.
11. Headlines
Students write a series of newspaper headlines that describe the main events of the story.
Set the number of headlines required as befits the length of the text.
Thank you for these activities. I have used variations of most of them, but a few are new, and others I hadn’t thought of using with The Giver.