I love, love, love finishing up a novel with a project that incorporates as many reading skills as possible. We just finished reading The Westing Game (deemed a favorite by many of my students), and we are also just about done teaching most of the standards. I wanted the students to complete a project that showed their understanding of the intricacies of the book as well as reviewed the skills we had been working on all year long.
Oh, and I only wanted to spend two short class periods on it. I'm feeling rather ambitious, and we are going to try to read The Phantom Tollbooth before school gets out at the beginning of June!
The projects themselves are fairly basic-looking. No bells and whistles here, but there is SO MUCH content in them! The students got an assignment sheet describing the six different sections of the project. The middle of the foldable included a brief summary of the book. Here is a copy of the assignment sheet (without Westing Game specifics). You can download a (free) printable copy HERE.
Some of my students who finished early did add some pictures to their foldables, but I didn't catch any pictures of those. Again, I know they aren't “pretty,” but there was so much content in them, and it was great to really see how well the students understood the book AND the reading skills we were working on.
