Literature Comes to Life

What is Living Literature?: I was first introduced to the concept of Living Literature through my work with my school’s Beta Club. Beta Club is an honor society for students who maintain an A/B Honor Roll with zero behavior referrals. As a part of the Beta Club, the students are awarded the opportunity to participate in the State Convention. My school’s club competes in everything from Songfest to Quiz Bowl, Talent to Speech. But my absolute favorite, and not to mention most stressful event, is Living Literature. The idea is simple – Students will recreate a scene from a poem, novel, or short story. They will be judged on backdrop, props, costume, make-up, and pose and facial expression. There’s one catch…the students must stand completely still. No moving. They students must maintain this pose in 15 minute shifts, getting a 5 minute break in between. After judging, Beta Club members from across the state travel through the Living Literature museum.

Can you give us some examples?: Duh. 🙂 This February our club will attend its fourth State convention. Out of our previous three entries in the Living Literature competition, we have taken home two 2nd place trophies. Not bad considering there are Beta Clubs who have a lot more money than us and have their own professional make-up artists on site. For our first voyage into the sea of competitive Living Literature, we recreated a scene from Elie Wiesel’s Night. Our scene focused on the forced expulsion from the Ghettos. The second year we recreated one of the forest scenes from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Last year, we switched it up and chose to explore the poem War is Kind. This year we are excited to announce that we will be recreating a scene from the much beloved novel, The Hunger Games. Much like when I read Twilight with my students a few years ago, a Hunger Games fever is starting to take over my school. Students from other classes are listening to my students talk about the book, running to me and asking me to borrow a copy. It’s great. We haven’t chosen the exact scene yet, but you best believe we will be sharing our final project right here with Novel Novice readers.

Why should I care about Living Literature? : Some of our students have a difficult time falling in love with literature because they’d much rather get their narratives in visual form (i.e movies and television). As educators, we really need to work our hardest to make literature come alive. You don’t have to attend a state convention to do something like this in your classroom. What a great way for students to engross themselves in whatever novel they are reading at the time. I also think it would be great if somehow I could convince classes all over the school to participate in a similar project. Wouldn’t it be great to host a literature night at your school—a Novel Museum of the books you’re reading?