Hello everyone!

I'd like to share with you my experience of doing a project on Charles Dickens's book "Christmas Carol". I'm generally keen on reading and reacently I've carried out a project devoted to Charles Dickens, his life and his famous characters. British Council resources helped me a lot.

In our project I aimed at making Charles Dickens interesting for primary school pupils. I was told by my colleagues that it was "mission impossible", though, fortunately, it turned out to be absolutely wrong. 

The project consisted of 2 major parts:preaparatory stage and the final linguistic and literature contest.The first one was devoted to life and books of Chrales Dickens in general and also focused on my favourite Christmas Carol and its characters. it consisted of 5 sessions. And the final one was the contest (or rather a game).

The kids who were inolved into this project aged from 8 to 10. They didn't have any special knowledge in literature or English, nevertheless, we managed to combine both aspects. I mean we read the book in Russian and then did some exercises with the original text analysing basic lexics to be able to characterise the personages.

According to my idea the first stage was to give basic information about Chrales Dickens and his life as the majority of kids didn't know anything about him and could just guess that he could be from England:). I used the British Council materials, the cartoon about Charles Dickens made by BBC (which is also very good and it wasn'tvery hard fro kids to understand the main facts). besides, I made used of some materials about that historical period to make sure kids understood in what conditions people lived, especially they were impressed by the information about children's life at those time. By the end of the first session  they were in topic and sympathized and empathized with little Charles who had to work at his 12 and visited his Dad in prison.

Next session was devoted to the books and mainly to those about kids. It turned out that some of the children had read or were already reading Oliver Twist, so the shared their impressions with the rest. We also revised the facts from Dickens's biography and they rememebred everything:).

Throughout our third session we spoke about Christmas traditions (it's a bit too late, I guess, but it all went well as we concentrated on discussing the meaning of Christmas and the message that it brings to people). It was a really moving talk as we spoke a lot about kindness, charity, mercy and other good things which are common for all cultures. I also told them about Christmas traditions connected with the name of Dickens.

The fourth session was about "Christmas Carol" which is my favourite. We talked about the structure of the story, about its name and main charecters and story lines. We read sevral passages from the book with descriptions of Scrooge, spoke a lot about his transformation and what made him change. it was very interestig to listen to the children's opinions and conclusions,we also watched some episodes from a marvellous cartoon starring Jim Carrey which they loved.

At our fifth session we had much lingustic work as we did many vocabulary tasks with synonims fro "miser" and found out that it used to mean an unhappy person, which lead to a discussion. We also trained teh oppisites for these negative words and made portraits of Scrooge as a small boy, then Scrooge who was a rea "miser" and finally of " after-Christmas Scrooge". we also compared this lexics to the words with the same meaning in Russian. At the end of our meeting I explained in detail what our final meeting was going to be like. We cheked one more time if they all understood the rules and aims of the final contest (or rather a game) and left the school.

From the very beginning the project was to fifnish with a linguistic and literature contest devoted to Charles Dickens and his "Christmas Carol". And that was what we did and quiet successfully. I will post the contents of this game and the questions and tasks if you're interested in them.

At the end of my too long a narration I'd love to say that I really enjoyed doing this project and I'd like to know your opinion of the idea itelf. Will it work in your context? I find it extremely inspiring and we are already thinking of our next project devoted to another English writer as it's very rewarding form all point of view.

Waiting for your replies and ideas to share!