Look at These Miserable Projects

My eighth graders just finished reading Les Miserables, and I wanted to share some of their final projects with you, because they’re really fantastic.

First, here is a downloadable version of the project instructions so you can use this project yourself. It could be easily adapted to almost any novel. The basic idea of the project is for students to show me that they understand the main events of the novel, and to use their creativity to produce a quality product. Les Miserables is a complicated story, and I want to make sure students don’t get lost in the details.

The eighth graders work on this project solely on their own time, and they have almost three months to work on it. The thing I love about this project is that students get to choose their own way of showing me what they know. This year the projects were amazing. I’ve got some photos for you to look at, but they really don’t do these projects justice. And this is just a sample of the 51 projects I received. Students also created movies, made PowerPoint presentations, and performed their own songs.

So, without further ado, Les Miserables Projects 2006-2007:

Here you see a group of three projects: a map of Paris and France with events from the novel marked with pins, a timeline done in calligraphy, and the board to a Les Miserables Monopoly game.

Next are a few pages from a student’s graphic novel, beginning with the cover page:

This is an example of a musical interpretation, where students choose modern songs that they feel relate to the book in some way. They print the lyrics, put the music on a CD, and explain how the songs relate to the book.

This is a page from a Les Miserables scrapbook. If you look closely you can see the note that Marius left for Cosette under a stone in the garden. You can actually unfold the note and read it.

And here is the first page of a Les Miserables children’s book:

I have several more examples on my Flickr page arranged as a set called Les Miserables Projects 2006-2007. You can also view them as a slideshow. Enjoy!