Several websites I came across gave me some inspiration for activities for various kinds of assessment:
1. To test students' content knowledge of the text is http://www.vocabulary.co.il/literature-games/.
This website contains a myriad of online games mainly to test and help students remember facts about the literature that they read. Students are required to remember some content facts about their texts and with this website, the games are interactive and rather exciting and it makes content reading more exciting than pure memory work.
The other good point about this site is that it contains many literary "classics" such as Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights, Matilda, Nineteen Eighty-Four and so on.
A limitation is that it does not cover that wide a variety of texts and I have only found Romeo and Juliet that is on the current Lit syllabus.
Also, it is a very low level assessment for content only. It would work well only if we want to focus and test their content knowledge.
2. The other website is http://www.litlovers.com/litcourse-course5-lecture?start=2. This is a website of online Literature lectures. For example, students can go there and watch the online lecture that teaches them about Character. I would suggest linking this with the activities I found in point 3:
3. Education World also provides some suggestions and ideas about teaching students about Characterisation (http://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/harry_potter_learning_activity/character_sketch_for_a_new_wizard.shtml) and also to expose them to poetry through a "Poetry Calendar" (http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/techlp/techlp027.shtml).
I find these very compelling and interesting examples and ideas about how to intrigue our students and in the meantime also teach them literary techniques and how to read Literature. Rather than just teaching them in the classroom about characterisation, students can go on the link in point 2 to value add to their knowledge in the classroom, and also we can use the Character Sketch idea for a class activity or extended over a few periods. The students will get an idea of how characters can be crafted and in the process understand the things to look out for when analysing characters in their texts.
I also like the Poetry Calendar idea whereby students take ownership to discover good new poems that can perhaps be within the teachers' parameters. In this way, they will be able to find what is interesting to them rather than be fed with poems from the teacher. Interest in their own poems will result in more motivation and excitement when it comes to sharing and working on them.
It is hard to find assessment websites for Literature in general but these activities that I found have potential to become continuous assessments for in-class and take-home assignments that are in the meantime interesting yet enriching as well. Of course, we have to tweak these ideas for our local classroom context, syllabus and the class profiles in order to be effective.
Hi Tiffany, I like how you have drawn from different websites and tried to make the connections. There is certainly a place even for comprehension in the Literature classroom - the question is where and when this happens to help students best learn to move on to analysis and evaluation.
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