Reading and teaching a classic literature book to twenty-six teenagers in four hours at the end of April: is it a "Mission impossible"?
I do not think so.
At the beginning of the year I booked tickets to go to an English play at a local theatre. Students love going to the theatre and I have to say that we have watched many different plays perfomed by this company and they are really interesting, engaging and motivating.
This is the link to the company:
This year's show was FRANKENSTEIN. The company sends you the script and all the material to prepare the students for the show, together with some worksheets to work on after seeing the show. I have always used that material and found it really useful but this year I wanted to do something different. Being that the story was taken from Mary Shelley's book "Frankenstein" I wanted to have my students work on the book.
So I used the Usborne's version of Frankenstein and started from there.
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I took pictures of some pages of the story and distributed them randomly to my students. Each page had a number on it and students ( they worked in pair) were given a post-it note with the same number.
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Students had to translate and briefly summarise the story. They could use dictionaries and computers.
After this comprehension task, each group read its part of the story to the class. They could either read it or explain it or tell the story using their own words.
Students had to pay attention to each part of the story because they had to try to put them in order. Each time the students in line had to re-read their part so they the others could check if the story was making sense or not. I have to say that this whole activity took two hours and by the end of the lessons the students had put all the parts in the correct order and they knew the story.
After this pre-play phase.... we went to the theatre!
My students LOVED the show so I decided to work on the story a little bit longer even after the play.
I found some free Frankenstein comics online
and asked my students to add dialogues. They could change the story and use their imagination. What came out was really interesting and a lot of fun! They used a laptop and edited the stories with Powerpoint or Google Slides.
So my answer to the question at the beginning of the post is "DEFINITELY YES!". It is possible to teach teenagers about classic literature, we just have to find new ideas to engage them and motivate them!
Thank you for reading,
Miss Alex
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