Dickens’ A Christmas Carol stands out strongly from his other works, but not because it’s so different, really, in what it hopes to accomplish. Critiquing society, drawing attention to the world outside the doors of the wealthy in Victorian England, hoping to create social change… this was Dickens. But it’s in A Christmas Carol that he condenses this message and provides joy in equal measure with distress. I’ve read a lot of Dickens, though I never did quite manage to finish Bleak House even after carrying it around for months, but it’s A Christmas Carol that most stays with me, and that most feels like a doable add to a high school curriculum filled with many voices.
At the same time, we can’t talk about A Christmas Carol without considering how it centers Christmas. If you’re going to teach this book, consider how you can also acknowledge the many other holidays that happen in this season – Diwali, Hanukkah, Eid, Lunar New Year, and more. I recently redid all the imagery in my winter holiday maker project (snag it free here) because I realized that although I had tried to keep Christmas from dominating, it was still too red and green. Take a look at the simple changes I was able to make (below) to create a more inclusive project, featuring imagery from many holiday traditions.
And if you’d like to explore more inclusive holiday activities, you can find a bunch in this round up blog post.
But to come back to Dickens, I think it’s important to use the vehicle as a book to discuss Dickens’ desire to use his art to create change, his context in Victorian England, and the transformation of his character, Scrooge, rather than seeing it as mainly a fun holiday activity, because of course, many students do not celebrate Christmas and so reading a Christmas story won’t necessarily feel like a fun holiday activity to them. IKYK.
OK, with all this said, let’s dive in to five creative activities you can use with this text, whether you choose to read the play, watch the movie, or some combination.
Text Options: The Play
Perhaps you have a stack of this play available in your book room or classroom shelves. If not, it’s in the public domain now so you will likely find different versions peppering the internet. The full text is available in the Project Gutenberg E-Book.
If you’re teaching the play (or if you’re not), you might want to consider adding some multimedia bits and pieces, to show students how it appears on different stages. Here are a few possible videos to consider.
Royal Shakespeare Company: Trailer
Guthrie Theater: Meaningful Movement on Stage Behind-the-Scenes
Broadway: First Look
Text Options: The Movie
Whether or not you want to play the full movie, it could be interesting just to compare and contrast all these different movie trailers – A Christmas Carol has been remade SO MANY TIMES. It could be fascinating to go on a scavenger hunt and have different students screenshot similar elements across trailers – what does Scrooge look like? A ghost? The set? Tiny Tim?
You could also consider, across trailers: What is the mood like? How do the different spins impact the way you see the story? (The BBC version, for example, is so intense, like a true crime or noir spin, I found it a shock but also fascinating).
The Way-Back-in-the-Day Version
The Muppets Christmas Carol
The Animated Version
A Super-Creepy Looking BBC Version
The Netflix Version
A Christmas Carol Activity #1: Dickens’ Social Dilemma
Before jumping into A Christmas Carol, it’s helpful to set the scene. Because the novel is a social project, attempting to use a festive transformation people could enjoy watching to create real social change (perhaps getting people to do things they did NOT want to do), students needs to understand the world Dickens lived in and its problems. A webquest or set of stations could each work as students learn about the industrial revolution, the ragged schools, child labor, workhouses, and any other social elements of the time you want to share.
Links:
The Industrial Revolution in Dickens’ Time
Charles Dickens’ Letter about a Ragged School
Dickens’ Experience working in a Factory as a Child
A Christmas Carol Activity #2: Scrooge Choral Reading
The beginning of the play showcases such an extreme version of a person – Scrooge is THE WORST. And the literary language to paint him as such is way over the top. It’s a great time to stop and pay attention. Try dividing students up and having groups do choral readings of passages describing Scrooge. Each group can use techniques like these to showcase their description of Scrooge:
- Volume Change
- Pace Change
- Repetition
- Paired Voices
- Single Voice
- Group Voice
- Sound Effects
- Beat Box
- Movement
- Tone of Voice
A Christmas Carol Activity #3: Character Analysis
In reading this again as an adult, I was fascinated to realize that Scrooge is the only round, dynamic character in the play.
It’s the perfect time to talk about round/flat and static/dynamic characters, and keep a little chart of characters as you go. It leads to big questions about why Dickens’ would create such an imbalance in the cast, making it clear that Scrooge is in every way our focus in this story.
A Christmas Carol Activity #4: Transformation Theater Masks
Well, likely you know how much I love a one-pager. For this play, I like to add a theater twist, using the familiar theater mask imagery to show the two sides of Scrooge – the way he’s portrayed before his transformation, and the new man he becomes. Students can fill the masks with quotations, imagery, character details, intentional color choices, etc. to portray Scrooge before and after.
A Christmas Carol Activity #5: Graphic Adaptation
As you saw at the beginning with all those videos, there are SO many adaptations of the original text! There’s the prose version, a theater version, a Muppets version, and many different movie versions. Why not have students experiment with their own original adaptation, from text to graphic novel? Let everyone choose a very short scene – a moment really – that they’d like to interpret through graphic adaptation. You can teach key concepts from graphic novels like gutters, bleeds, close-ups, and intentional color choices and then ask them to play around with those concepts in creating a one or two page adaptation, leading into a class gallery. This can be a major project, but it can also just be a one or two day activity where students get a chance to experiment in a new genre.
Want the Done-for-You Version?
If you’d like my full version of these activities, you can find them here on TPT.
Looking for more Holiday Activities for December?
This fun poetry workshop, created in collaboration with Melissa Alter Smith of #teachlivingpoets, is one of my favorites! Challenge your students to create a holiday poem using only one vowel, and see just what a huge challenge it is! You can sign up for this free resource right here.
Want to get students reading great books over their holiday? Fabulous! You can sign up for the free wintertime book tasting activity right here.
Need a great activity for the first day of the new year – solar or lunar? Try this sneakerhead-inspired vision board. You can sign up for this free New Year’s activity right here.
