Postcards from the Ledge Part 2

A few weeks ago I posted about using postcards to describe the settings of books.

This week the students finished this project, I found it a very fun and useful activity that combined reading, creative writing and geography.

Here's how the activity worked for the first lesson:

1. I introduced students to postcards and how they are laid out. I used literary based ones to introduce them to the topic.

 

 

2. I then did an example from a book in the library. For these lessons, I chose Tinder by Sally Gardner, which has multiple interesting settings.

 

 

 

3. I then handed out blank postcard templates, explaining to the students that I wanted them to describe the setting of the novel they are currently reading. I asked them to pretend that they themselves are characters in their novels and to write a postcard back to the "real world" describing what they are seeing.

 

 

 

 

 





During the 2nd lesson, I had students finish their postcards and then we discussed postcards in general.

 

This generated a discussion about our geography section, where I was able to highlight what are in my opinion heavily underused yet great books, like the one seen below.

 

 

 

After this discussion we had a postcard quiz where students were given 15 real postcards and had 5 minutes to figure out what country they belonged to.

 

These lessons created a nice display as well, definitely one to try again next year.