Tea Party Anticipation Activity for Novels

This activity is a great way to get kids moving and talking, and with minimal work, can be used as an anticipatory activity for any novel. It provides a fun opportunity to introduce readers to characters and setting, and more importantly gets them talking to each other about it.

A "tea party" can be as simple as a discussion, introducing readers to characters, setting, and plot, or it can be a production as large as you want it to be with juice and cookies to help students get into the part. Using quotes directly from the book, students are introduced to different parts of the story, and moving among the classroom, they discuss these clips.

Rationale

Anticipatory activities are a great way to help students build background knowledge and understanding when beginning a reading. With any reading, it's important to spike the interest of the students as well as provide important information, and checking for comprehension begins from the very beginning of the reading process. Communication is a huge part of the curriculum, and this is definitely an activity that promotes communication among every student in the classroom.

Sample Activity

As with a traditional tea party, the purpose of this activity is to promote conversation and mingling among students. Using sentence strips and a worksheet, students work together to find information about the story.

To prep the activity, you'll need two things for the students: sentence strips and an organizer. The sentence strips are quotes taken directly from the story, and should provide information about a specific character or a detail about the setting. Each student is given a sentence strip, and will use the strips as they mingle and discover new information. The organizer is what they use to record the information they get. 

I used this activity to introduce my students to the characters and the setting of the story Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick. I chose to include information about the characters Max, Kevin (Freak), Grim, Gram, Kenny Kane, and Gwen. I chose to include these characters because each of them are introduced in the first two chapters. I also included information about the setting, especially the Down Under, the house they live in, and the neighborhood where they live.

Examples of the sentence strips are here. I like to laminate the strips so that they can be used multiple times without getting ruined. Each strip is a direct quote from the story.

An example of the organizer I use is here. I explain to the students that they are acting almost like detectives, trying to find information about each character and the setting. As they mingle and compare sentence strips with other students, they fill in their organizer. One thing I like to do to help monitor movement and noise level is create the expectation that students have to move silently throughout the room, and they are only allowed to talk when they are seated.

After the time allotted for the mingling in the tea party, I debrief with the entire class and we discuss what they found out about the characters and the setting. I create an anchor chart with all of the information, and they refer back to it and add to it as we read the story.