It was great to finish up Tom Sawyer with a great afternoon filled with fun and drama! But first we did the academics!
As I have in the past, the third session is all about conflict, theme and literary devices. For Tom Sawyer I added in a little poetry too!
Next, I had them break into small groups and play “What’s my Theme”. In their groups they were to think of a theme and then give three statements about that theme without telling us what the theme was.
This was a bit confusing so if I did this another time, I would do some brainstorming first of possible themes in Tom Sawyer. We then got back together and the groups gave their statements and we were to guess the theme. Here is the “What’s My Theme” sheet and the Answer sheet.
Next I had our students break up into small groups again and I gave them 2 literary device cards. They were to search the book and come up with examples from Tom Sawyer. Some of these were quite challenging and we only had a short time to do this. Here are the literary devices cards.
Finally I had our students do redacted poetry from pages from Tom Sawyer. I randomly ran off 16 pages from the book which I got from this site. They then redacted the pages and created poems.
An hour isn’t a lot of time, so it was definitely full this week. The highlight of the day was definitely the drama! Seeing our students put on the play Tom Sawyer. I know I keep saying it, but we really do have a gifted drama leader.
She writes these dramas with such skill so that each student has a great part, so that the essence of the novel shines through and most of all that the students can have a great time presenting it!
