Have you ever felt like you were the wrong person for the job? In this project, students will take two hypothetical people who are very different from one another and place them in each other’s shoes. To express the challenges that the two characters face, students will use ‘too’ and ‘not … enough’.
The Contestants
First, each pair of student should come up with two characters that are quite different from each other. If you have time and a particularly imaginative class, students can make up some original characters. If you are doing the Character Journey project with your class, each student in a pair might be able to apply their own characters (in this case, you may want to group the students according to how different their characters are). Otherwise, students should be free to take characters they know well from popular fiction.
For this post, we’ll use the example of Harry Potter and the Hulk.
The Roles
Next, each pair should write a list of the following for each character.
- 10 activities they often do
- 5 objects they often handle
- 3 places the might go
- 2 items of clothing the have been known to wear
The Swap
Now each pair should swap the lists between their two characters.
The next task is to figure out what situations are particularly challenging as a result of the swap. For example, “Hulk is too clumsy to hold a magic wand,” while “Harry isn’t strong enough to throw a car.” Pairs can brainstorm for a while, then students should select their top 5 tricky situations for each situation.
Pairs should prepare how they want to present the challenges to the rest of the class. The easiest way would be to write down sentences, then simply read them aloud to the class. Other options might be to draw the situation, or two act it out (of course, doing this is likely to make the project even sillier).
Whatever their choice, students should be able to express each challenging situation using ‘too’ or ‘not … enough’.
- There’s a bit of flexibility here. For example, we could say “Hulk is too big to sit at a desk,” or “the desk is too small for Hulk to sit at,” or “the desk is not big enough for Hulk to sit at,” all of which express the same thing.
- This is geared more for ‘too’ and ‘not enough’ as adverbs that modify adjectives (like ‘large’, ‘strong’, ‘angry’, etc.). However, you may choose to allow your students to use ‘too many’/’too much’ and ‘not enough’ to modify nouns instead.
Once they’re ready, students share their swapped situations and the resulting challenges with the rest of the class.
