Friday afternoons are long and painful for both teachers and students. This activity is a great way to have some fun with your class and learn some literature in the process. Susan Winebrenner, in Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom [Free Spirit Publishing Inc., 2001], describes this activity in great detail. Be prepared to spend at least four Fridays on this project, or consider making this an every Friday activity through the rest of the year.
Setting Up the Great Friday Afternoon Event
First thing you need to do to introduce the Great Friday Afternoon Event, is to divide the entire class into four teams. Allow each team a few minutes to choose a team name. There are four categories of events, and each team is responsible for one category each Friday. The categories are: Poetry, Declamation, Theater and Newscast. The teams must choose a different team captain each week. This is the person who makes sure that each team member contributes to the team.
If you have more than 28 students, you will need to add a category of events. Susan Winebrenner recommends story telling or choral reading as two optional choices. If you add another team and another category, it will extend the game by one week in order for each team to have the chance to do each category. To continue playing even after every category has been used, continue adding new categories, or simply have the students redo categories.
Friday Event Categories
The first category of poetry requires each student on the team to recite or read a poem. Having poetry books in your classroom library will be very helpful to the students with this category. They also have the choice of writing their own poetry and reading or reciting it to the class.This is a great way to teach students how to appreciate poetry.
The second category is declamation. The students completing this category must read or recite a portion of prose. This includes essays, speeches, book chapters and something that the student wrote herself. The third category is theater. This can be a fun one as the students must work together as a team to either read or act out a short part of a play. There are skit books that you can include in your classroom library that will provide material for these students to choose from, or they can write their own skit.
Newscast is the fourth category, where the students must work together and give a short news show about an event. The event can be something going on in the news right now, or something that they learned about in social studies class. In addition, the students are allowed to choose whether they wish to do a radio show or a television news show.
This is a great activity to do with your students to break up the normal Friday lessons. The categories you choose are flexible and will provide a variety of literature for your students to learn to appreciate. Having the students all go through each category gives you the opportunity to teach new things to students and to allow students to really shine in their strong areas. Remember to provide time during the week for students to prepare for their presentation.
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