My two advanced English 10 classes finished reading The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the last couple of weeks, and I had them create posters rather than take a unit test.
They had more than a week and a half to work on them, but I didn’t give them much time at all during class. (Of course, they didn’t have any other homework, since we were watching the 1941 movie version of the story at the time…)
As usual, the work varied from simply-awesome to barely-there. I have sooo many ultra-creative sophomores this year, though, so they were definitely heavy on the high end!
I’ll post the rubric I used tomorrow (because I forgot to upload the updated version of it to my server and don’t have access to it at home), but each poster had to contain the title, author’s name, one quote with page number, artwork, a description of major characters, and a timeline of the story’s plot with at least ten events.
In retrospect, I wish I had made it clear that these were supposed to be what one of my college professors referred to as one-pagers and everything had to be fit within the framework of one side of one poster. Some students placed work on front and back, and a couple even filled two poster boards, front and back. Although these were great as far as the work and creativity, they don’t publish well…
Also, I wish I’d added a separate graded quality for “creativity,” as I have in past years. That would’ve given me some more leeway in separating the posters that obviously took a lot of time and effort from the ones that were mostly print-and-paste.
I had students present their posters at their desks. (They just had to stand up.) And when it was picture time, I gave them the option of being in the picture or not.
After the presentations in each class, I let students mill around the classroom (which I never do!!) and look more closely at their classmates’ work. Then, I asked them to vote for their top three choices for Best Poster. I tallied the votes (three points for a #1 vote, two points for a #2 vote, and one point for a #3 vote) and gave out extra credit coupons to the winners (15 points for 1st place, 10 points for 2nd place, and 5 points for 3rd place).
And, now, in the order they were taken, here are the Jekyll and Hyde posters!!
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