I am currently reading Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest with my grade 10 class, most of whom are not native speakers of English. After completing Act One, we stopped reading and I was about to give them some of the usual activities I do at the end of each act. Thankfully I stopped and asked them to storyboard the act instead. They were asked to think of some key scenes and key quotations and then plan out their storyboard. We do have some fairly good artists in the class so I gave them the option of drawing their storyboard but also suggested some alternatives, such as finding images of people they thought fitted each character and printing and cutting them out before pasting them into a storyboard as a sort of collage. I also suggested they could pose their friends in tableaux for each scene, photograph it and then put those photographs together for the storyboard. This really captured their imagination and they all chose this option. The energy levels rose dramatically; all members of the class were involved; and I could hear that the discussions they were having about the play went beyond anything they would have had they merely written about what they understood or perceived.
A most satisfying lesson. See my other post for the photos.