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Ideas to Use for Great Expectations (stage I)

© Rebecca Kojetin

For years the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens has been required reading for many high school freshmen. Even in its abridged for that appears in the Prentice Hall anthology, the novel lasts for 58 chapters. With its length one of the hinderances to freshman who would rather do anything but read, in class activities, projects, and creative writing assignments that are produced in class have helped as an incentive to read the material.

IDEA ONE In the Victorian Age, many novels were published in magazines as a serial. Great Expectations was published weekly for 36 weeks. Like a soap opera or the old Batman series, each section of the novel ended holding the reader wondering what was going to happen next. During Dickens life, reading out loud to other was a common leisure time activity. Illiterate people would gather in the public inns to hear an episode read to them. Thus, I usually begin the novel by reading out loud the first one or two chapters and changing my voice for the characters. The students get a kick out of this and in most cases will read the rest of the assigned chapters for that night. I then occasionally read certain passages or even whole chapters in character voices to make the novel come alive for them.

IDEA TWO When Pip goes to Miss Havisham's house to "play" for her, he is asked to play an old card game called Beggar My Neighbor. In searching for ideas to use with the novel, I found the direction to this card game, and asked each student to bring in a deck of cards. DIRECTIONS This card game may be played by 2-6 players. Shuffle the cards well. Deal out the cards as far as they will go. It is ok if one or two players hold one extra card than the others. Without looking at the cards, each player should arrange the cards they receive in a pile face down in front of them. The player to the left of the dealer turns his card up first and places it in the center of the table. Then, the person on that person's left turns up a card and places it on the pile in the center. Players continue to do this until a Jack, Queen, King, or Ace is turned up. When this happens, the next player to the left needs to pay with his cards: 1 card for a Jack, 2 cards for a Queen, 3 cards for a King, and four cards for an Ace. If in turning over the payment, the player reveals a Jack, Queen, King, or Ace, the player stops turning over cards and the person to his left must pay. The payment is over and regular play is resumed when there are no payment cards played. When a payment is completed by a player, he may take the cards from the middle of the table and place them on the bottom of his pile. The winner is the one who obtains the whole deck.

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