Celebrating the Holidays Dickens Style

This is my 4th year teaching 6th grade and one thing I've done every year around Christmas is my Dickens unit.  In the past, I've started out with having the kids read a variety of bios over Dickens life, and then we start reading A Christmas Carol together.  The first year I did this, I didn't have copies of all the books, nor did all my students have devices, so we just listened to the audible version.  This worked for some, but several students expressed needing to read the print to better comprehend the story.  Eventually, when our school became a 1 to 1 school, I was able to find online pdf versions of the book, which worked out for the most part, but anytime students have their devices, it's difficult to control the distractions that come with the technology.  This year, however, I was thrilled to finally have a classroom set of the book, thanks to a teacher group I'm part of on Facebook.  This year I feel like I've done the book justice.

This is a photo from my Bookstagram account on Instagram: booksnapps

The Victorian Era

I was worried that I wouldn't have as much time as I would've liked to devote to this unit this year.  I am also teaching Digital Citizenship, and I also only have 45 minutes per class.  Because of the time crunch, I didn't start out with my Dickens bios this time.  This year, I had the students put their "digital" skills to use and they did some research over the Victorian Era.  This is so important because the reader really needs to understand what was going on in this time period to understand the setting of a Christmas Carol.  The students learned all about London being the most populated city of the world at this time in history.  Also, they learned about what poverty looked like at this time and what work houses were and what prisons were like.  When we started reading the story, most students knew exactly what Scrooge meant with the following quotes: 

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned – they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.” “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.” “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides – excuse me – I don’t know that.”

When my students read and heard that part (from audible), they all looked at me like they couldn't believe what Scrooge said.  They knew that he basically felt that people in poverty were better off dead.  Had they not had a good understanding of the Victorian time period, that part would've gone right over their heads.

Image Source
Click on the following link for a great Victorian Era source: https://charlesdickenspage.com/charles_dickens_london.html

Bios

To incorporate more of my digital citizenship curriculum to this unit, I had the students create their own hyper-docs over Charles Dickens life.  This saved a ton of class time because they did the research on their own and also learned important aspects of Dickens life.  A hyper-doc is something new that I've tried this year and I absolutely love it.  It works well for one to one schools and also is perfect to use with Google Classroom.  What I do, is upload a simple template that I created on docs.  Usually it's just a two column table with three rows.  Within the directions I explain that the students need to find three credible sources over a specified topic.  They hyperlink the sites on the left side of the table and on the right side they briefly summarize the site that they linked.  This allows them to practice skills of searching and finding credible sources online and also helps them develop skills in writing summaries.  The template the students had on Google Classroom looked like this: Dickens Hyperdoc.  If you'd like to use this template, click on the link and make a copy for your own classroom use.  Here's an example of one of my students' work: Dickens Hyperdoc Student Work.  

Learning about Dickens' life in this way helped my students developed an understanding of his inspiration for A Christmas Carol.  My students learned that Dickens' father was arrested when he was 12.  He was thrown into debtor's prison because that's what happened back then when someone owed money and couldn't pay it off.  As a result of this, Dickens was forced to go to work at the age of 12 at a blacking factory.  This childhood trauma allowed him to develop a deep concern for the treatment and care of people living in poverty, which was the inspiration for most of his books.  

The Story

One reason why I love reading through "A Christmas Carol" every year is because most students have seen some kind of version of the story in a movie or a play.  Most are familiar with "Mickey's Christmas Carol," or "A Muppet Christmas Carol." 

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Since they have a basic understanding of the story, it provides an excellent opportunity to expose the students to classic literature.  Also it is a great way to challenge the kids to read and understand a story that's on the higher end of the lexile scale, which is 900 according to the website, https://fab.lexile.com/search/results?keyword=9780439101332.  Since I have reluctant and struggling readers in my classes, I have the students listen to an audible version of the story and read along in their books.  I love using an audible version when reading something together rather than the old, "Round Robin" reading style.  For this story, audible works very well because the reader in the version I've chosen has a British accent, so that helps set the tone and mood of the story.  As the students read, I printed off the following templates for them to fill out A Christmas Carol Visualizations.  I wanted to focus on the plot elements of the story, so I broke up the story into the following sections: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Resolution.  I don't believe in busy work, especially when it comes to reading, (I can't think of a faster way to kill a person's love for reading than busy work) and also we are weeks away until Christmas break, so getting the students to do any thing that remotely seems like busy work is just not going to happen at this point in the year.  So, the students draw pictures to go along with the story.  I have them draw pictures of specific characters and setting (exposition), and give them specific scenes to draw.  I tell them if they have an artistic ability like mine, then it's perfectly fine to draw stick people.  I just have to get some kind of idea of what's going on.  I also told them that if they really don't want to draw then, they could write character traits for the characters and summarize what's going on in the scenes I want them to represent.  Using these templates opened up a lot of great discussions because we were able to use the templates to guide our discussions so that the students had a good idea of what to write or draw.  I also have blanks to fill in for each template...here's a key in case you aren't as familiar with the story: Key for A Christmas Carol Visualizations.

Wrapping up the Unit

This year, I found an excellent digital escape room over "A Christmas Carol." It was the first time I tried an escape room, and I'd say it was a success.  I actually was able to use this as a way to motivate the kids to be all caught up for me when it came to reading the story and getting their work finished on time.  This really was only an issue for students who were absent frequently to catch up on the reading on their own.  I told them that if they were behind, they'd have to use this time get all caught up instead of participate in the escape room.  There were only a few that didn't get to participate because the students were excited about the escape room all week.  All the students who participated were engaged the entire time. Unfortunately, since I only have 45 minute classes, not all the students escaped, but I gave them the option to escape at home and they could upload a screen shot to Google Classroom.  I didn't count the escape room as a grade, but awarded Class Dojo points to the students who escaped.  Here's a link to the product on Teacher's Pay Teachers.  I highly recommend it! A Christmas Carol Digital Escape Room.

All students are actively engaged and trying to beat the clock to escape!

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come made an appearance in the Escape room! This particular student wanted to dress the part for the Escape Room. 

This was my first student to escape in my first class of the day. 

I was able to keep the spirit of Christmas going with a Christmas Carol up until the last day of school.  I showed the movie, The Man who Invented Christmas, which was free this year for Amazon Prime users 👍.  This allowed me to have one more individual reading conference with each of my students for the 40 Book Challenge before Christmas break.  This movie has so many "Easter eggs" from "A Christmas Carol"  Also, there's several connections to Charles Dickens life that the students picked up from reading through some of his online bios.  It was neat for them to see the process of writing "A Christmas Carol" that Dickens went through.  The students learned from the movie that Dickens wrote the book in six weeks 😲.  This was totally unplanned, but we finished the movie on December 19th, which is the anniversary of the day that the book was published.  It was published 175 years ago this year.  I also scheduled an afternoon in our performing arts center for the entire 6th grade to watch Disney's 2009 version of A Christmas Carol.  This is my favorite movie version because I feel it's the most like the story out of all the movie versions I've seen.  This story was originally a ghost story, and this movie does this very well.   I can't watch this movie with my own children because it's too scary for them, but for 6th graders, they enjoy the spooky element in movies, so they loved this version as well. 

I was surprised that I was able to keep doing A Christmas Carol activities up until the very last day of school.  The day before the last day of school, I assigned students roles from the story and they made social media posts in character using a Padlet site I created. They had a ton of fun with this, and they were able to put their dig cit skills to use through this activity.  On the very last day, the students pretended that they were at Fred's Christmas dinner and they played a few rounds of the game "Yes and No."  I had other games like charades and "How, When, and Where," ready in case they became bored with "Yes and No," but the engagement lasted until the bell rang.  I actually had to promise them that we'd play the game another time so that they'd go on to their next classes.  

Having fun playing the game, Yes and No

My Takeaway

This is a unit I hope to do with my students for years to come.  It's become a big part of my holiday tradition that I hope I can continue for as long as I'm teaching.  With teaching several classes, I've probably read through this story a total of 15 times, and it never gets old.  The lessons readers can learn from "A Christmas Carol" apply very much today as they did 175 years ago.  It's very difficult to keep the students engaged during this time of year in school because they are so excited about the holidays, but this unit allows me to keep the learning going up until the very last bell rings before Winter break.