Looking for meaningful, low-prep ELA activities you can use with any novel, short story, or narrative text?

This resource includes five flexible interactive notebook activities designed to deepen students’ thinking about literature — without requiring hours of planning, custom worksheets, or text-specific prep. Simply choose your text and go.

Perfect for middle and high school ELA classrooms, these activities help students analyze theme, character, motivation, decision-making, and textual evidence in engaging, hands-on ways that actually stick.

What’s Included (A Full Week of Meaningful Work)

Each activity is designed to fit seamlessly into interactive notebooks and can be used independently or as a cohesive mini-unit:

• Through a New Lens – Students analyze a text using four distinct perspectives:
  Personal Connection, Power & Roles, Social & Economic Forces, and Motives & Mind

• Themes in Motion – A foldable accordion activity that helps students track how a theme develops, changes, and connects to real life

• Quote It, Prove It, Connect It – A structured close-reading organizer that scaffolds textual evidence and interpretation

• Character Decision Map – Students break down a key character choice, motivations, consequences, and alternate paths

• One Powerful Line – A creative, reflective one-pager that brings together theme, analysis, and personal insight

Each activity includes clear prompts, student-friendly language, and built-in scaffolds to support a wide range of learners.

Why Teachers Love This Resource

• Works with any text (novels, short stories, memoirs, narrative nonfiction, films)

• Low prep and easy to implement

• Encourages deeper thinking, not surface-level responses

• Great for interactive notebooks, formative assessment, sub plans, or early finishers

• Includes adaptations for ELLs and struggling learners

• Reusable across units, texts, and grade levels

You’ll get thoughtful student work without rewriting lessons every time you change texts.

Perfect For

• ELA teachers who want rigor without burnout

• Interactive notebook classrooms

• Literature circles or whole-class novels

• Standards-based, discussion-rich instruction

• Teachers who want students to actually think, not just fill in blanks