Your New Go-To Novel Activity

Finding a good novel activity is a game-changer. Finding an activity you can use for any novel is a lifesaver.

There’s something about novel units that begs for a project. Could we just assign guided reading questions and an essay at the end? Sure (and we have). But we spend so much time guiding (or, perhaps, dragging) our students through a novel, we want to make it a memorable and meaningful experience that shows the culmination of the idea that everything we talked about works together to serve a purpose.

We want our students to be creative. We want our students to reflect. We want our students to connect with the themes and characters. We want to give our students the opportunity to do something other than just . . . read, answer questions, and write.

But a novel activity can go wrong or flat so quickly. We’ve all read book reports based on the great authors SparkNotes, Shmoop, and Wikipedia. We’ve read journals that, despite our best intentions, contain more creative writing than literary analysis. We’ve graded scrapbooks that clearly demonstrate a visit to the local craft store but say nearly nothing about the book. We’ve endured video projects clearly created with the sole purpose of entertaining classmates (with humor that definitely doesn’t translate to us).

When a coworker shared a simple flip chart activity to help our sophomores review literary terms in their unit on plot and character, our wheels started turning. It seemed like it had potential to be so much more, and we started thinking about how we could adapt it for our novel-based AP English Literature class.

Over the next five years, we refined and refined and refined some more. We knew the core was good, so each time our students missed the mark, we found new ways to craft and shape the directions to lead them to generate exactly the type of thinking and effort we wanted. And in the end, we crafted a novel activity that provides opportunities for creativity while also helping students assemble a meaningful literary analysis that ties everything back to theme (and requires students to do much of their own work rather than Googling, which is always a win).

So, are you ready for the details?

The Flip Book Activity That Works for Every Novel or Play

Each page has its own specific directions:

Page 1: Setting and Point of View

On the first page, students create a new cover for the book (inviting creativity). They must include the title, author, setting (time and place), point of view, and a quotation that clearly shows that point of view.

Page 2: Theme Paragraph

Students write a theme statement for the novel or play and a paragraph explaining and supporting their selection of theme (with correctly integrated, punctuated, and cited textual evidence, of course).

Page 3: Conflict

Students must identify and explain (with textual evidence) a key internal and external conflict from the novel or play. Both conflicts must relate to the theme they identified on page two, and students must explain the connection.

Page 4: Characters

Students must select three important characters from the novel or play, provide text-based illustrations, identify their character types, and explain the choice of character type with two pieces of textual evidence per character.

Page 5: Plot

Students must create a plot diagram for the novel or play. Students can’t just choose any events: the exposition has to actually reveal the characters, setting, and conflict; the climax has to be correct; and the complications have to actually connect the exposition to the climax (and be arranged chronologically).

Page 6: Literary Devices

Students select three literary devices from the novel or play, provide an example of each in the form of a quotation, and explain how each literary device reinforces the theme they selected on page 2.

While we could tell the project had potential right from the start, it was initially easy for students to find many of the pieces on the Internet. As our directions became more explicit, however, and we added the requirement to tie each piece directly to the theme statement (including the reimagined cover), the majority of our students began to create meaningful projects that reflected an understanding of the novel and went beyond the superficial. (And, as always, specific directions make it a lot harder for our students to successfully hand off the task to their friend ChatGPT.)

Why We Love This Novel Activity So Much

It requires students to move beyond plot summary and personal reflection to literary analysis.

We all have students who produce meaningful work regardless of the assignment. But for many students, the novel activity rarely moves beyond the level of summary. We were thrilled to discover a relatively simple way to push students to think beyond the superficial.

It works for any novel or play.

The directions are not specific to any one text, and the assignment asks students about elements that are evident in every novel and play. It’s helpful for all of us to find an activity we can go back to again and again, but in a culture where texts are frequently challenged by parents and communities, you need flexible yet meaningful activities you can assign for alternate texts on short notice.

It’s a helpful review tool.

On the AP English Literature exam, students’ third free-response question requires them to write about a novel, play, or epic poem of their choice. We assigned our students to create a flip chart after every novel and play that we read so that before the exam, they had a meaningful study guide to help them review. (Of course, this works best when students actually give these flip charts their best effort, but there is only so much we can do!)

It requires a significant amount of academic writing while still looking like a creative project.

Our students need to write (and write a lot), but they don’t get excited about writing frequent essays, and we don’t get excited about reading frequent essays. The flip book activity requires students to write multiple paragraphs that include claim, evidence, and commentary, but because it’s not an essay and there are creative elements included, it seems less intimidating.

It’s easily adaptable.

We’ve used simplified versions of this novel activity with our standard-level sophomores, and we’ve even adjusted the directions to fit specific texts. When we read To Kill a Mockingbird, we had students analyze an important symbol (instead of selecting their own literary devices), and we included a personal reflection page. It made for a much more pleasant final project than dragging our student through yet one more essay. 

The flip chart activity would also make a great final book report for independent reading that requires students to do more than simply summarize. We’ve even used it with movies in our post-AP exam film unit and it still works really well!

It gives students the opportunity to be creative while still producing meaningful literary analysis.

We like to give our students opportunities to flex their creative muscles, use color, and create artistic representations of the works they’re reading, but we’ve learned that these projects can easily become superficial. We’ve seen some gorgeous flip charts over the years, but the heart of the assignment is still literary analysis.

It places theme at the center.

For the first few years we used the project, things didn’t really tie together. Students selected minor characters and bizarre literary devices that really weren’t all that significant (it’s easy to tell your students have used the Internet when they tell you a character is the deuteronomist, a term we certainly didn’t teach since we’d never heard it ourselves). 

When students selected characters and literary devices at random, they struggled to explain why they were significant or what purpose they served. But when we started requiring students to tie everything to the novel’s theme, their selections got better, and most importantly, we reinforced the idea of artistic unity, that authors are intentional about using language and literary devices to convey a clear message.

It can be completed digitally as well.

When we taught from home during the pandemic, we knew we needed to find a way to make our go-to novel activity work. So we created a digital version, and we were pleasantly surprised to find that when students had room to type rather than handwrite, they actually had more to say!

It forces students to go back to the text.

Can students still find some of the pieces they need on the Internet? Of course. But they have to provide multiple pieces of textual evidence, which sends them back to the pages of the novel or play. And because they have to craft an individual theme statement and tie all the pieces to that theme statement, they’re forced to at least do some of the thinking on their own. Any time we can trick our students into doing at least some of the thinking, we count it as a win.

Whether this particular assignment appeals to you or not, we hope we’ve given you some food for thought about how you can refine your go-to novel activity or what you should look for when hunting for a novel activity that works for you.

If you’re ready to try out our favorite novel activity, your work is done. We’ve provided all the materials you need: detailed student directions for both paper and digital versions, a student example (with each page about a different novel to deter “borrowing”), a detailed rubric for teachers who want to hold students accountable for each individual element, a holistic rubric for teachers who want to evaluate the overall quality, and a detailed lesson overview with all of our best tips and tricks for implementation in your classroom.

If you have any questions we haven’t answered here, don’t hesitate to email us at hello@threeheads.works or DM us on Instagram @threeheads.works.