Introduction
If there’s something that challenges most high school students, it’s writing about literature. For high school English Language Arts teachers, the real challenge is finding fun ways to teach literary analysis itself.
In my experience, students often loathed the literary analysis: the idea of responding to literature in a critical manner, looking at the sum of its parts to understand how it contributes to the whole, was something new and novel to them. Many often preferred taking a multiple-choice test instead of writing a literary analysis!
However, once I designed unique activities to introduce them to the concept of analyzing literature, the literary analysis essay was no longer an assignment that worried most of them. For many, it was an assignment that deepened their appreciation of literature.
What follows are a few of the fun ways to teach literary analysis that I’ve used in my classroom.
The Social Media Profile
One fun activity students is creating social media profiles for a character in literature. This activity helps students with character analysis.
Whether it’s a profile on Facebook or Instagram, students use their creativity to think of how a character’s social media profile might look. They’re given a 22×28 poster board that serve as the basis of this assignment.
Things that belong in the profile included:
- Profile Picture: a drawing or an image of an actor whose likeness resembles the character
- About Me: short bio that captures the character’s background, personality traits, and key motivations
- Feed: several posts that reflect key events or moments in the character’s journey; they should also include direct quotes from the text
- If students opt to create an Instagram page for the character, the images on their feed must include a caption that explains the image’s importance and relevance to the character
- Reels: Instagram or Facebook Reels that provide insights into the character’s thoughts, feelings, or reactions to events in the story
- As is common in most Reels, text overlays, emojis, and images that the Reel’s enhance storytelling should be used
In completing this activity, students slowly begin to realize that they are analyzing a character, making this activity one of many fun ways to teach literary analysis.
When it comes time to write an essay response about that character, students are able to synthesize the information from the social media profile and the text itself to write a sufficient response.
Scene Storyboard
Another fun activity is storyboarding a scene.
This activity helps students analyze setting, dialogue, character actions, and either symbolism or imagery. Before beginning this activity, it’s important that the text being used is one that lends itself to being storyboarded.
In this activity, students draw a storyboard on an 8.5×11 paper. They’re responsible for sketching scenes of important moments in the text that may include symbolism or imagery.
Each panel will have a brief description of what’s happening in the scene and why it’s important, using a quote from the text to support the description. Then, they’ll share their findings with a classmate (or other groups if students are grouped), noting any similarities or differences between each of their storyboards.
After completing this activity, students will be able to synthesize information on their storyboards and understanding of the text to write a essay response that might ask them to analyze how a particular scene contributes to the overall text.
Conclusion
When thinking of fun ways to teach literary analysis, having students create a character’s social media profile and storyboard a scene are a great way to introduce students to the task.
These activities not only help students explore their creativity, but they also introduce how a literary analysis works by scaffolding the process. As an added bonus, it also helps them write.
Do you have any fun ways to teach literary analysis to your high school students? Let me know in the comments!
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