Teaching "A Christmas Carol" - A Favorite Holiday Tradition

I'm linking up with the Secondary Smorgasbord today, and I couldn't be happier.

There are a bunch of secondary teacher-authors participating. So, be sure to check them all out at ELA Buffet's blog and Desktop Learning Adventures. This month's theme is TRADITIONS. I thought I'd share one of my favorite instructional traditions for this time of year.

If you're a middle school teacher, you know that there's a wonderful (and complicated) dance that goes on in the middle school classroom. It's a tango between elementary school and high school.

Middle Schoolers are caught right in the middle of this dance.

In the classroom, I've found that students yearn for many of the elements of an elementary classroom - crafts, interactive projects, centers, and stories. Yet...they feel an intense pull to be "over" those things and act more high-school-ish. With that in mind, I love to teach units that tap into the learning that they loved when they were younger and disguise it into a unit that seems much more sophisticated. That's where my yearly unit of "A Christmas Carol" comes in. It's the perfect combination of fun and rigor. It's a traditional story that I love to make a yearly tradition in my classroom.

  

In the end, we have a lot less of this...

And a lot more of this...

It's a tradition worth keeping!  If you'd like to give it a try in your classroom, you can check it out here.

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