Creative Lesson Plan

I am not sure that this can be considered creative as it was a modified combination of activities which happened all at once (role-play, freeze-frames, close-reading and annotation), but it was quite successful and the kids had a great time and managed to grasp some inference skills.

It was a 45-minute lesson and we were due to cover Chapter 5 of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Since characterisation is an important aspect in the chapter, and the class has quite a handful of restless, loud boys, I decided to pick important scenes to role play. Each scene focused on a different aspect of characterisation--action, dialogue, etc. While role-playing, the actors had to form freeze frames and say out what they thought the character was thinking at that point of time (but not written in the novel). The class would then be asked to refer to the relevant passage in the book, do close-reading to interpret the textual evidence (and what the actors "thought"), and annotate their passage.

At the end of the lesson, they had interpreted textual evidence through role-playing, freeze frames and close reading, managed to identify character traits of Father and Bruno, as well as the nature of the relationship between them.