So, you are looking for interesting and creative English project ideas to spice up your lessons?
Here are 18 practical projects that will help your students get creative while enhancing their written and communicative English skills. These are applicable to your middle school and high school students.
Creative English Project Ideas
Advertisement
Test your students’ creativity by asking the them to make an advertisement for inventions of their own. Or they can stick to readily available products within the market.
Ask them to start with the connection: how their product will solve the issue of their ideal customers. Tell them that the best advertisements trigger consumers’ emotions. Let them use powerful adjectives to inspire their fictional customers.
Elevator Pitch
Like advertisement activity, this project also focuses on commercial communication. You would like to assign this project only to high school students because of the amount of research that goes into it.
Start by asking students to review successful elevator pitches of successful startups.
Detail the necessary information and persuasive tactics.
Ask them to create their own business model or select one from vast startups present in the business world.
The last step is to present the whole concept in 3 minutes or less.
Abstract Word Art Activity
If you’re looking for a fun group project for 4 or more kids, wacky abstract word art activity is just the ticket. Offering writing practice and grammar review, this isn’t your average art project.
Kids practice building sentences with different parts of speech, then create paintings of the silly mad-lib sentences they come up with. In an unexpected fun twist, at the end they get to rip up their paintings and arrange them into wild and unique abstract collages.
Autobiographies
In this fun project, you ask the students to detail their life history in an interesting tone. To avoid monotone, ask them to only include those events in life which they consider adventurous or unforgettable.
Ask them to highlight emotions rather than timeline.
You can add a twist to the exercise by asking them to write their ideal future life in an epilogue.
Book Clubs
This project will focus on verbal communication skills.
Ask the students to select a book or excerpt from a book to read. You can assign a genre to keep the communication streamlined.
Students can take turns to give a short review of their reading together with their viewpoints about it. They can talk about the moral values of the characters or change endings or events to discuss if the plot becomes more entertaining with these changes.
Check out these ideas on how to run a successful Book Club!
Class Magazine
This is a perfect project for all classes in middle and high school. You can take it to the next level by asking the whole school to start a competition for the best class magazine.
You can ask your class to select a theme of environmental, health, literary, or societal topic.
Then ask them to gather all skills; idea-generation, writing, design, and presentation. You will get the most benefits if you make it mandatory for every student to produce content for one page of the magazine. (You can include the advertisement activity within the activity of class magazine.)
Comic Strip
This is another extensive project that will not only win the hearts of your students but also allow you to assess their creative capabilities.
Ask them to illustrate interesting events from their lives, or imagination, in the form of comic strips.
Dramas
This activity is similar to the comic activity given above. The only difference is the increased detail that is required in drama writing. An absence of images adds the obligation on the students to describe scenes and expressions.
Again, students can describe any life event from their reality or imagination.
You can later ask the students to act on the best dramas to improve their verbal and non-verbal communication.
Paper Mache Activity
In this messy yet super fun project, students make paper mache futuristic Earths or other imaginary planets as described in science fiction.
This was my cross-curricular activity based off of our Literature reading of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and a unit topic in English about the environment and recycling. Of course, you can do paper mache for any lesson or unit that you have!
This article gives you the step-by-step instruction on how to do paper mache in the classroom!
Editorial/ Fan Letter
Editorial is one of English project ideas most suitable for high-schoolers while fan letters work for learners from all English expertise levels.
Ask your high-schoolers to analyze a societal issue that is close to their heart. Next, they need to define the problem from the viewpoint of aggrieved parties. Ask them to write out the problem and get it published in a local or national newspaper.
(Be ready to proofread and edit the piece before they send it to relevant personnel.)
Younger students can write fan letters to their best actors, authors, and singers.
Inventions
This is another English project which will combine societal, and practical, understanding with English learning. In this project, the students will learn problem-solving skills.
Ask them to understand a societal or scientific problem. Once they have understood and defined this issue, they have to provide a solution to this problem.
In the end, they have to present their solution together with the need which gave rise to it in front of the class. (You may want them to include a video presentation with visual effects.)
Diorama
This activity is one of my students’ favorites not only because it’s fun but also because it facilitates their learning. I tried this project on two literature readings I had before (The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain and Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe) and both achieved the same fantastic end.
In this project, students are tasked to illustrate the setting or a specific part of the book in the form of a three-dimensional miniature scene. Students will pick a favorite scene from the story they are reading and decide how they want to represent it using the materials given (above) and a variety of design strategies.
Parodies
This writing exercise contains the most fun among all the given projects. You will excite their creativity as well as their inner critic.
Start by inquiring about the literary work which fascinates or inspires them most.
Ask them if they can add humor to that piece. Let them edit a single character or scene or if they want they can give a humorous outlook to the whole plot.
Fables
This open-ended English writing project will ask the students to select one event in their life. This event should be intriguing as well as contain a life lesson.
Then, they have to retell this piece in third person pronoun. Ask them to keep the tone conversational as well as engaging.
In the end, ask them to write a conclusive moral of the story.
Self-Portrait Project
These self-portrait ideas were part of a short project that went really with my middle school ESL class so I thought I’d share them with you.
My students were able to come up with three products in one activity: a mind map, a self-portrait and an essay. The unit topic was about “Identity” or “Personality” but I guess this will work for general descriptive adjectives lesson as well.
Charts
If you want to include futuristic touch to your English lessons, include a thing or two from STEM subjects. One great way is to ask them to explain or detail a mathematical chart. (You can come up with variations in this original plan. For example, you can ask future businessmen to interpret graphics related to market studies.)
See, if they have enough vocabulary and concepts to comprehend and convey the message to their fellows.
Fictional Pen-Pals
Just like fan letters, this activity asks the students to write letters to their favorite characters in fictional and non-fictional worlds.
Ask them to pinpoint the era, region, settings they like most in a given novel or historical account. Next, they would show interest in one of its characters and the reason for this interest.
In the end, they need to write a letter to this character praising or advising him/her regarding his/her role in the piece. (You can reply on behalf of that character if you think the point made by the student inspires further dialogue.)
Book Trailer Project
Book Trailer Project is a digital storytelling activity for middle school or high school students after they finish reading a book. Students need to take the key idea from the book to create a short video that persuades people to check out a book they have read.
Doing the book trailer project requires students to summarize, synthesize and analyze the book and put that analysis in their trailer. Furthermore, having students create book trailers is a great way to incorporate technology in the classroom and encourage reading. Thus, book trailer project is a great alternative to boring book report assignments, and can easily be done individually or in groups.
Take Away
So these are some of creative English project ideas you can use in your English class to prompt your students to express their creativity and language skills. These are fun, practical, and learning-inducing.
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