I created this review activity as a way of getting my students out of their chairs, interacting with each other, and interacting with the text.
How to set it up
I go into Word and select a large font of at least 24. Then I type out different actions and characteristics of the main characters. For The Lord of the Flies, I included Piggy’s glasses being broken, Jack smearing pig’s blood on his face, and Simon helping the little’uns get fruit from the tall branches.
These are printed out and cut with one event/trait on each slip. I tape the slips around the room or all over the front board. Wherever you do it, make sure they are mixed around so it’s not obvious which goes with which character.
Leave plenty of tape for the students to pull them off the board and reuse the tape to attach it to the correct poster.
For each main character I print out a picture of their head (for my visual learners) and tape it to a long sheet of paper I hang from the wall. This is where each event/trait will be taped.
Options for Implementing the Activity
There are a few options for how to do an activity like this
- If you have a small, quiet class you likely will just explain the directions and assist the students as needed while they complete the activity as a class.
- If you have a squirrelly, competitive group of students, you may want to create a competition. Put the students in groups and assign them a character. Whichever group correctly finds all of their character’s slips first is the winner.
Benefits of this Review
I love this activity because it is a good refresher of everything important that has happened or been mentioned so far.
The finished posters can stay on the walls as a constant reminder of each character. I catch my students looking at them frequently as we read and complete future activities.
Finally, it’s a quick assessment of how much your students understand what’s happening in the text. I like to do this at any point after the first third of the book. The visuals here are for after chapter five of The Lord of the Flies. I also did this with The Kite Runner after the first third of the text after Amir and Baba left for America. Oddly enough, I did it with Oedipus after the prologue.
