I learned about the activity Freeze Frame from my dear friend Carol Gaab when I was just beginning to use readers in my language classroom. I’ve done variations, but the main idea of the activity is to get students to pose in a manner that represents one of the scenes from the story (or even just a chapter) that we’re reading. I can take the pictures of the groups or the student groups can take their own pictures… whichever we do, these images let us get repeated exposure to the text as we discuss what was happening in the book when each of the scenes occurred. (Read more about Freeze Frame at the Comprehensible Classroom).

In addition to Freeze Frame, I love AnneMarie Chase’s rendition of the Game of Quotes for Spanish classes. What I love about Game of Quotes is that students are given a situation (You are in the restroom and someone tries to open the door of your stall) and must use the text to find a “quote” that would make a good/funny response.

I decided to combine features of both activities in the game “Freeze Find”. Student pairs draw a piece of paper with a scene from the text. They step into the hallway to figure out their pose. When they’re ready, they return and freeze for the class in the pose they’ve chosen. As they wait, student groups (I divided my classes of 24 and 29 into groups of 5 with one odd group of four each) search the text trying to find the line that is being represented. Students copy the line onto their white boards. Every group that is correct receives a point.

What you need:

*A story to read or a chapter book

*A whiteboard, marker, and eraser for each group of 5

*A set of events from the story or chapter that you can cut apart for students to draw from

They had so much fun trying to figure out exactly which line the students were acting out. Since they could not do charades, the class was really making me laugh as they debated whether a facial expression was irritation or nervousness, anger or sadness, etc.

This is very low prep, I actually wrote out my event list on my way to school! Hopefully you’ll try it and let me know what you think!!