Novel Study: Choice Cards
I have vague memories of a novel project that I did in grade 6. At the time, I was reading Firewing by Kenneth Oppel. Each day in class, we would complete tasks outlined on different cards. As we completed a card, we returned it to a box and selected another. The cards were colour-coded and we were required to complete a certain number from each colour depending on the difficulty. Other than this vague memory, I don’t really remember what sort of tasks I had to complete. Still, with this as inspiration, I pitched this sort of project to my partner teacher as part of our final unit in Language & Literature.
I wanted to give our students more freedom and choice in part to celebrate the end of grade 6 and their growing autonomy, but also to encourage them to explore new activities and ideas. Within our unit, we were exploring historical fiction. We had collaborated with the librarian in order to put together a wide selection of books which meant that students had books on the First or Second World War, but also on immigrating to the states during the 1960s and experiencing conflicts in the Middle East. No matter their historical time period or context, we wanted activities that would allow them to demonstrate their skills but were also accessible.
After creating our list, I formatted them and colour-coded them according to their criteria strand. We had five yellow cards, which had to do with creative writing and producing text. There were three options that were purple that had to do with analysis, and three blue cards that explored mapping the story and looking at the organization of their text. We also had one green card that had to do with presenting content orally. This last card was more of a formative activity since we also had a monologue component toward the end of the year and we wanted to give them feedback on their use of voice ahead of time.
As we come to the end of the unit, we had pros and cons:
The students were really engaged throughout the process and the variety of tasks we chose seemed to really inspire their creativity
It was easy to do mini-lessons that corresponded to different card activities over the course of the unit and now that we’ve done it once, it would be easy to supplement it with mini-video instructions
Grading was a bit more of a challenge, especially for the purple cards focusing on analysis skills
Some of the activities took more time than intended and as a result, we ended up skipping the blue cards since we did not need to assess criteria B anymore and the main purpose of those activities was to help them identify key moments from their novels
I look forward to fine-tuning this project the next time I teach this type of novel study unit.
Our full brainstorm for activities can be found here along with a list of the Lang & Lit MYP 1 criteria.
