Ask your students to choose their favorite Tom Sawyer adventure and rewrite it as a modern story. This is an excellent exercise in deep reading and fiction writing, as well as in history. Students should identify the elements that date their chosen story and find ways to update those elements as a pre-writing exercise.
In "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," Mark Twain writes about the game of marbles. This was a popular game for boys Tom's age during the mid-1800s. Marbles are still available and are reasonably priced. Students learn the game as part of their Tom Sawyer curriculum, and even hold a class- or school-wide tournament. This becomes a research project if groups of students are assigned a certain marbles game to learn and teach the rest of the class.
One theme of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" is that boys are expected to get into trouble and cause problems in a way that girls are not. Ask your students to write about and discuss what the phrase "boys will be boys" means and how it fits into modern society. As they consider the phrase, ask them to think about what it means for girls. This is a good way to introduce feminism into your curriculum.
As students read "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," ask them to take notes on all of the major characters. Make a list of questions, such as the character's name, age, description, relationship to Tom and purpose in the story, that the students fill out as they learn more during the course of reading. Students use this information to incorporate art into the curriculum by making playing cards. Ask them to draw pictures of each character on one side of a cardboard rectangle and write information about them on the other.