After you have analyzed and discussed some poems in your class, ask your students to choose a poem that they especially liked and respond to each line or, for longer poems, each stanza. For example, if a student chooses Walt Whitman's "One's-Self I Sing," the first stanza could be the heading and the student's response could follow in a paragraph, so it would look something like this:
ONE'S-SELF I sing---a simple, separate Person;
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse.
Walt Whitman is interested in regular people, like himself. He wants to write about himself, but he also wants to keep in mind that he and each one of us is part of a group, a member of a democratic society. This is something new in poetry, because before Whitman, people thought that only great men and their great deeds were worthy subjects of poetry.
Ask the students to pretend that they are newspaper reporters and that their job is to report a scene from a play as a newspaper story. Get them started by providing a headline -- Feud renewed between Montagues and Capulets -- and have them answer the classic newspaper questions of who, what, when, where, why and how. You can create a complete newspaper with all the different scenes reported as newspaper stories. In the end, your newspaper will stand out as a sort of DIY Cliffs Notes.
Start by choosing a point in your book where a character has to make an especially important decision. For example, if you are reading "The Great Gatsby," ask your students to write a letter to Nick Carraway. They have to give Nick some advice -- should he help Jay Gadsby reconnect with Daisy or not? This is a stealthy way to teach the rhetorical mode of argument, while also requiring the students to be familiar with details from the book, which they will use to support their arguments.
Combining movies and books is a great way to reach students who may feel more comfortable with moving images than static text. "The Long Goodbye" by Raymond Chandler is a great work of American fiction. While the Coen brothers' "The Big Lebowski" is not a film adaptation, there are a lot of parallells between the two works. After reading the book and seeing the movie, have students describe some of the similarities.
For a more conventional compare and contrast essay, students could compare and contrast Dashiell Hammet's "The Maltese Falcon" with John Huston's movie adaptation. Students could make a list of all the differences between the book and the movie and then try to explain why the film makers made the changes for the movie.