Should You Teach A Christmas Carol in Your Middle School ELA Class?

Teaching A Christmas Carol In Middle School

Should you teach Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in your middle school ELA class? A Christmas Carol is a classic story that every student should read. Although the story is set in Victorian England on Christmas Eve, it is not JUST a story for those who celebrate Christmas. It is a story for EVERYONE. The story’s themes of choosing kindness, loving your neighbor, helping those in need, and not letting your life be ruled by greed are universal and timeless. The message of A Christmas Carol is to keep kindness in our hearts all year long and not just on one day of the year.

A Simple Yet Powerful Plot for Middle Schoolers

I love to teach A Christmas Carol in my middle school ELA class because of its simple, yet powerful plot and well-developed anti-hero Ebenezer Scrooge. Dickens has chosen Christmas Eve, a magical night, to have his miserly, miserable protagonist visited by three ghosts that show him the misdeeds of his past, present, and future. Scrooge has one night to decide to change the way that he lives his life forever.

Engaging Middle School Students in the Story

Although most students have heard the title of the story A Christmas Carol, I am always surprised how few students actually know what the story is about.

One of my favorite “go-to” strategies to build interest in a text for students is a word cloud. I use a word cloud every year when I teach A Christmas Carol in my middle school ELA class to get students excited and invested in reading the story.

The idea behind a word cloud is that you paste all the words from a text into a computer program that sizes & places the words based on the frequency of their use in the text. It then creates a beautiful pattern of words of all sizes. Students hunt through the words to find the ones that grab their attention. They then use the words to make a prediction of what they think the story will be about.

Word clouds sound too complicated to make? No worries, I got you. I love to make them and have several for sale in my TPT store. You can also find one for A Christmas Carol that I use in my middle school ELA classroom to teach A Christmas Carol. It can be used as a stand-alone product, but I highly recommend checking out my A Christmas Carol Bundle, the word cloud is included as well as a lot of other goodies!

The Perfect Dynamic Character

Ebenezer Scrooge is also a wonderful character to teach students characterization. Scrooge is a dynamic character that changes throughout the story. We learn what he is thinking, feeling, we see the actions he takes, we also learn how others view him & what they say about him. Dicken’s provides plenty of examples of character traits to choose from.

I personally like to use a visual graphic organizer of Scrooge (featured below) to help my students understand how an author uses characterization in the story by identifying examples from the text that develop Scrooge as a character. This graphic organizer is part of my A Christmas Carol Bundle on TPT.

So Many Versions...So Little Time

The story A Christmas Carol has been adapted over the years in so many ways story, drama, musical, cartoon, and film. There is no shortage of options for a teacher to choose from. I have adapted my A Christm as Carol Bundle to work with any genre of the story that holds true to the basic plot & characters to help teachers have a successful experience teaching the story.

Time to Get Creative in Your Middle School ELA Class

One of my favorite extended activities I like to do after reading or viewing the story A Christmas Carol is to have students create a Victorian Christmas Character Card. The year Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol was also the first year that a Christmas Greeting Card was published for sale in England. It is possible that if the characters from the story were real people, alive at that time, that they would have sent each other a greeting card.

The students create a Christmas Greeting Card from one character to another using detail from the text and their characterization graphic organizer to show they understand the author’s tone and the conflicts in the story. It is a great alternative assessment assignment and can also function as holiday decorations for your classroom.

You can find a short history of the greeting card, instructions for the activity, and a grading rubric for the cards as part of my A Christmas Carol Bundle in my TPT store.

"No One is Useless in this World that Lightens the Burdens of Another."

“No One is Useless in this World that Lightens the Burdens of Another” -Charles Dickens.

I would have to say this is one of my all-time favorite literary quotes to share with students. I have a class poster of the quote and class gift bookmarks as part of my A Christmas Carol Bundle.

You can use the quote in a few ways: ask students what they think Dickens means by the quote as a warm-up, class discussion question, essay question or as an exit ticket. I also like to prompt students to give examples of how they can show acts of kindness by “lightening the burdens of others” it is a great way to wrap up the unit.

I usually extend this activity by using Kindness Bingo cards and set a challenge for students to commit random acts of kindness over a period of time. You can find my Kindness Bingo cards by clicking here.

Charles Dickson’s A Christmas Carol is a classic story that every student should read. It is a story for EVERYONE. The message of A Christmas Carol is to keep kindness in our hearts all year long and not just on one day of the year. This is a timeless message that prompts kindness and goodwill in students and in the classroom environment.

Would you like more support on teaching A Christmas Carol? Check out my FREE video training HERE!