Charades are ideal to help students develop better comprehension skills and inspire them to engage with the material. Divide the class into teams and pick scenes from one or more books in the current curriculum. Ask each team to act out one of the scenes without using verbal communication, while the other teams have to guess the chapter. Alternatively, give the students specific words and they have to find a scene in one of the books that best describes the terms before acting the scene before the class. In the process, students will increase their comprehension and reading skills.
Combine literature and art lessons by charging the students to design and create a board game based on their favorite book or works on the current curriculum. Templates for board game making are available for free on several educational resource sites, in addition to templates for cards. The students will not only define the rules and make their own game patterns and pieces, but also have to find questions and answers for the cards. Questions can relate to details from the books, biographical information about the author or historical backgrounds of consequences for the work. Once finished, the students can test the games by asking classmates and teachers to play against each other.
Students in high school learn about the structure of novels, and how writers can influence the reading experience through various techniques. As a game, invite your students to write a novel consecutively throughout the school year where everyone has to contribute at least one page. Deliver the first one to two pages which will give an idea about characters and tone of voice. Hand the text to a student who will be given one week to write her part of the story before forwarding it to a classmate. While writing, the students have to consider the previous text, use their imagination and follow rules on how to structure a text. To avoid that the novel gets off topic, take the text home over the weekends and make adjustments if necessary. At the end of the year, the teacher can proofread the novel, print and laminate the text and hand it out to the students.
Divide the class into teams and ask them to write questions based on a text in the curriculum. Each team challenges the other groups, with one point given for each correct answer. Alternatively, ask the teams to write down answers related to the texts, which can be names or events, and ask the other groups to find a question that suits the answer. Quiz games are a good way to evaluate current comprehension skills as well as encouraging students to read a text closely.