Literary Circles - Final Presentation

As a group you will prepare a final presentation that will incorporate and encompass all you have learned and worked on throughout your study of your novel. Each member must equally contribute to the presentation and final project. In doing these presentations you are attempting to “sell” the book to prospective readers. Therefore, to complete this project you must come up with a 20 min. lesson which captures a single aspect (theme, character, idea, setting, etc.) of the novel you have been studying. The minimum requirements for the presentations are:

·        BRIEF summary of the novel (Do not give away key parts or the end of the novel!)

·        BRIEF biography of the author and how he/she relates to the novel and the time period during which he/she was writing.

·        Focus for the activity/discussion that will ensue

·        It is imperative that each group member facilitates or leads some aspect of the lesson.

Beyond those three requirements you are allowed to “teach” us anything you want, as long as it is somehow bound to a single part of the novel as a whole. Some suggestions include:

-         Close reading to identify theme (provide students copies of text)

-         Scene reenactment followed by discussion of character development/interrelationships.

-         Character analysis based on excerpts of the novel (provide students copies of text)

-         Style analysis (works especially well if you have read an author whose style is challenging or unique – provide students with examples from the text)

-         Socratic seminar: Questions based off of excerpt from novel

-         Small group discussions based on identifying different themes from a variety of excerpts from the book

-         Activity/Game which allows for the discussion of a theme related to the text.

-         Etc.

Note: It is very difficult to facilitate a class in a discussion about a text which they have not read. Therefore, your task is to engage us in a lesson which hints at a single aspect or part of the novel you studied and piques our interest.