For the lazy and the uncreative

Charlene

During my search for websites that share interesting ways of assessing Literature, I came across this website Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT). TpT is an online community platform for educators to share resources. It is not a website that is merely restricted to the subject of Literature, but also contains materials for most of the other subjects that are taught in schools. Aside from assessment materials, one can also find resources on lesson plans, powerpoints, activities and so on.  A lot of the activities that I came across were actually very engaging and ones that i've never thought of before. While it contains an extensive range of materials, the downside to TpT is that most of the good stuff aren’t free. Nevertheless, even if you don’t plan on buying any of the resources, you can always browse through the platform for interesting ideas that you can adopt for your lessons.

For the purpose of this site sharing exercise, I’ll be sharing two activities that I came across that I found useful and interesting.

One of the noteworthy assessment materials that I came across was a Facebook-inspired one, and can be used as a supplement for novels. 

It differs from the traditional assessment methods in which students are given topic questions or scaffolded guides to tease out their understanding of the novel in essay style, and works more as a formative form of assessment. Being less demanding in answering techniques, I feel that this resource is more suitable for the lower secondary level. It can be used as an alternative form of hotseating where students take on the roles of the characters, and also as a sketch to assess the students’ understandings of the different characters, their mastery of the content or prose analysis. Furthermore, teachers can make the lessons more interactive and dynamic by incorporating the use of ICT. Instead of a printed worksheet, students can actually set up Facebook profiles for the characters so that they can cross-refer and comment on each other’s postings.

While the Facebook-inspired activity caters more to books and novels, I also came across this roll-the-dice poem activity that I find quite apt for assessing the students’ understandings of poetry in a fun and engaging way.

Similarly, it demands lesser from the students in comparison with traditional poetry analysis and is more of a introductory activity to poetry for the lower secondary level or weaker-ability students. It offers a fun way to engage the students and can be used to assess their understandings on a given topic or literary device that they are supposed to center their poems around (e.g. metaphor, alliteration, personification, etc). At the end of the activity, students can also exchange their poems for deconstruction and analysis, so that they can be assessed on how they relate the theme, form, content, poetic devices and critique the poems that their friends wrote.

Chen Ying (Charlene)