Using Louis Sachar's Holes as a Teaching, Activity Tool in Class

The young adult novel Holes by Louis Sachar is a very popular selection in middle grades language arts classes. In my opinion, Holes is a great book appealing to both genders and especially to reluctant readers. Holes was the 2000 recipient of the Newbery Medal and was also adapted into a Disney feature length film starring Shia LaBeouf and Jon Voight.

If you are interested in teaching Holes to your students, do not hesitate! One of the best parts about teaching this text is that there are so many activities which you can create to accompany it.

For instance, doing journal writing assignments is a piece of cake with Holes. There are limitless suggestions. Here are my top three favorite ideas for using Holes with a Language Arts or Creative Writing journal:

1. Holes sentence stretcher: The students would each choose a rather bland sentence from Holes. They would stay away from sentences with many adjectives, adverbs, and other descriptions. For instance, a sentence in Chapter 21 that could be used is "He went over to his hole". Next, each student would pass their journal around to about six people. Each person must add or change one word to make the sentence more specific or interesting. By the end, "He went over to his hole" could be "Stanley quickly ran over to his stinky, dusty hole".

2. Off Limits: Each student would have to write a description in their journal about what it would be like to dig a hole like Stanley. However, the following words would be off limits: holes, hot, hard, tiring, dirty, and camp. This would encourage creativity and make the children think about using vivid words. Perhaps they would even dig out the thesaurus!

3. Picture story telling: This activity would occur prior to reading the book. Since Holes is a movie now, I would find pictures of scenes in the movie; in fact, my copy of the book has several in the center. I would print out the pictures or xerox them, and give a picture to each student. The more bizarre the picture (one has a truck falling into a hole, for instance), the better. Each student would then write a journal entry describing what that picture was about. Since they would not have read the book yet, they would not know what the picture was really about.

I hope these suggestions encourage your students to keep writing and reading!