Meaningful & Fun Activities for Teaching The Great Gatsby

When I taught American Literature, I always had good intentions of studying The Harlem Renaissance after teaching The Great Gatsby. However, I rarely (ok never) had enough time left to do it justice, especially with all the end of year disruptions. Then, like a yellow car flying through the Valley of Ashes, it hit me: unlike Gatsby and Daisy, The Great Gatsby lesson and Harlem Renaissance make the perfect pair. 😉 

By pairing The Great Gatsby with The Harlem Renaissance, you can sample diverse American Dream voices, create a richer reading experience, and ensure you don’t run out of time for one of the leading literary periods in our canon. I hope this post inspires you to create an immersive and inclusive reading experience with these engaging Gatsby text set ideas!

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Activities for teaching The Great Gatsby and Harlem Renaissance

Pre Reading Activities for The Great Gatsby 

To set the tone for your Great Gatsby unit plan, consider incorporating The Great Gatsby introduction activities that celebrate the Jazz Age as a whole. To set the stage to engage, you may consider decorating for your Gatsby unit BEFORE starting the novel. Here are some ideas. 

• Decorate with posters that showcase a multicultural setting 
• Play Jazz Age music by famous Harlem Renaissance musicians
• Watch context videos that include the Harlem Renaissance
• Set up the pairing theme from the start 

 For example, in my Great Gatsby introduction stations, one of the tasks is to look at the original cover of The Great Gatsby and predict what the novel might be about based on color symbolism. Beyond this, students also look at other Art Deco style book covers from The Harlem Renaissance to get a feel for the artistic style of the time. 

If want spark student interest with a type of personality quiz, ask them “How The Great Gatsby” are you? You add this Bookish BINGO board to an introduction station or any of the ways I have in the teacher notes. Get your free Bookish BINGO board below!

Another fun pre reading activity for The Great Gatsby is to have students read about the fashion of the 1920s and create an Art Deco Avatar. This activity is mostly for fun but students LOVE it. They can’t help but laugh at their silly 1920s names and to play dress up with 1920s fashion!

During teaching The Great Gatsby

Before updating my Great Gatsby teaching unit, I did a color symbolism study of The Great Gatsby. While the old unit certainly lacked diverse voices, I still stand by these fun activities for teaching The Great Gatsby through a color symbolism lens. So, when I updated my Great Gatsby teaching guide, I kept the color tracking elements and put them into a handy booklet that students can fill out and color while listening to The Great Gatsby audiobook. 

In addition to tracking color throughout the novel, students also track literary elements such as quotes from The Great Gatsby, theme, voice, and analysis evidence. 

Beyond a literary analysis of The Great Gatsby, students dig deep into The Jazz Age by comparing Harlem Renaissance poetry to The Great Gatsby passages. Here are some specific activities for teaching The Great Gatsby.

The Great Gatsby Chapter 1 Activities: 

Teaching The Great Gatsby chapter 1 is important to get right because it sets the stage for the rest of the novel. However, Fitzgerald makes it difficult on us English teachers because the first part of chapter 1 in The Great Gatsby is laborious and boring. I said it. 

Though after reading The Great Gatsby about 100 times, I can appreciate Fitzgerald’s word flex, it’s not ideal for hooking students on this American Dream novel study. 

Therefore, I highly recommend substituting the first 8ish pages with this Gatsby graphic novel . If you or your students click “look inside” on Amazon or “read a sample” on Overdrive, you’ll see how the graphic novel adaptation succinctly and artistically summarizes all they need to know about the context in much fewer words. This strategy can be especially helpful when teaching The Great Gatsby to ESL students. 

Another added benefit to cutting out part of chapter 1 is that you can add diverse text sets. A fun activity for The Great Gatsby chapter 1 is to have students look at a modern Gatsby retelling by Nghi Vo. Vo uses a lyrical magical realism technique to tell the story through the narrative voice of Jordan Baker. This provides an interesting opportunity to look at the diction and style of both authors. 

Another Great Gatsby activity for chapter one is to focus on the “beautiful little fool” quote and pair this feminist tone to that of Harlem Renassiance author Georgia Doulas Johson and her iconic poem “Heart of a Woman.”

For the rest of this blog post, I won’t go into as much detail about approaches to teaching Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, but you will notice how all The Great Gatsby chapter activities aim to help students analyze the deeper meanings through color, art, and Harlem Renaissance poetry pairings.

The Great Gatsby Chapter 2 Activities:

Using their Art and Analysis book, have students read the first part of chapter 2 individually and visualize what the Valley of Ashes looks like by focusing on color and description. This image of grays with the contrast of blue eyes will become clear later on as they better understand the color symbolism meaning in the book. If you want more art pairing ideas for The Great Gatsby, check out this post: 5 Unique Pairing Activities for The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby Chapter 3 Activities: 

Did you know you can look through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s personal ledger!? After getting a shock as to what Fitzgerald was spending in today’s money, students reflect on what their own “rich” life might look like.

This money reflection prompt is from I Will Teach You to be Rich by Ramit Sethi, and I highly recommend this book for personal finance! The title is a little sarcastic because he’s all about defining what living a “rich” life means to you. Fitzgerald’s book budget is definitely rich-life goals for me! 🤑 How about you? If you want more math pairing ideas for The Great Gatsby, check out this post: 5 Unique Pairing Activities for The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby Chapter 4 Activities:

As this article points out, chapter 4 is the only place in the novel where Fitzgerald gives a nod to The Harlem Renaissance. To help students better understand this movement, pair the limo scene with context videos and an excerpt from Dr. Alain Locke’s The New Negro. 

The Great Gatsby Chapter 5 Activities:

In addition to all The Great Gatsby fun activities, I’ve already mentioned, another crowd favorite is to assign students a mini creative writing project where they reimagine the private conversation Daisy and Gatsby have in chapter 5. Due to the limited narration style of The Great Gatsby, we aren’t privy to what is said between them. Using StoryboardThat or a DIY storyboard, students recreate this scene from a third person omniscient point of view. 

The Great Gatsby Chapter 6 Activities:

One reason I’ve always connected with the story of Gatsby is that I have a similar “Fake It Until You Make It” mentality. I was writing posts for this blog long before it was the polished, zero typo masterpiece you see today (LOL). While I refuse to link any of my first posts out of utter embarrassment, I’ll just tell you that they were bad. I had NO CLUE what I was doing but I did my thing anyway. 

Turns out that was an OK strategy. For the big reveal in chapter 6, have students read some informational texts about when faking it until you make it works and when it doesn’t. 

If you want more informational text pairing ideas for The Great Gatsby, check out this post: 5 Unique Pairing Activities for The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby Chapter 7 Activities:

Ah, chapter 7, what a train (car) wreck! There’s so much in this chapter that I recommend splitting it into two days. 

Chapter 7 Day 1: Read up to the part where Nick personally attacks me by suggesting life is basically over after 30. How dare he! This is a great stopping point to pair different tones toward the future. Fitzgerald was disillusioned with life, but in the poem “Youth,” Hughes sees it differently. 

Chapter 7 Day 2: Consider hooking students by putting caution tape on the door as students walk in and playing a NYC ambiance with sirens in the background. Hand students the Police Report Activity as they walk in and have them read the account of the accident while filling out the witness report. 

The Great Gatsby Chapter 8 Activities:

In addition to another poignant pairing for this chapter, have students focus on the flower symbolism in The Great Gatsby with a fun activity. Hook students by having real, faux, or printed flowers on group tables when they walk in. Without looking up any information, have students brainstorm what they think the symbolism might be for the flowers. There are plenty of articles online about flower symbolism that you can use afterwards to see which students got close to the meanings. 

After reading chapter 8, have students think about Fitzgerald’s flower choices in the book– Daisy, Myrtle, Grotesque Rose. 

The Great Gatsby Chapter 9 Activities:

Chapter 9 is so sad. Let’s make it even more depressing, shall we? The first step is to have a digital candle burning for Gatsby’s memorial when students walk in. Next, make it a little more melancholy by adding some sad jazz music playing in the background. Then, after finishing the book, really set the dark mood off by pairing Zora Neale Hurston’s real life tragic ending with Gatsby’s funeral. 

Zora’s Death  is one of the saddest stories in literary history (but it has a happy(ish) ending if you read to the end of the article) Zora Neale Hurston, Genius of the Harlem Renaissance 

Excerpt from Genius of the Harlem Renaissance

 Despite a prolific output that included four novels, two folklore collections, an autobiography, and a wealth of short stories, essays, articles and plays, Hurston died penniless and alone …[and] was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce.

It was an especially cruel fate because she’d once appealed to activist W.E.B. Du Bois to create “a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead” to assure that they’d never be discarded. Her rejected proposal read in part: “Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness. We must assume the responsibility of their graves being known and honored.”

Consider having students pay their respects to both Gatsby and one Harlem Renaissance author by doing the prompt in the Gatsby Memorial Slideshow. To be extra, you can place battery candles by the posters of Gatsby and authors and have students place their words of remembrance by the figures.

 

After Reading The Great Gatsby Activities

I include American Dream pairings, essay prompts, and test questions in The Great Gatsby teacher’s guide, but here are the fun activities for The Great Gatsby when you finish the book!

First, you could do a Socratic Seminar to process what just happened and what it means. You can learn how to do a Socratic discussion in this post or learn how to spice one up in this post: How to Liven Up Your Socratic Seminar and Get Students Talking

Next, if allowed, The Great Gatsby movie is absolutely worth showing. I tend to only recommend movie pairings for novels (not adaptations) since I know many ELA teachers aren’t allowed to show movies for fun in English class, but if you use a Great Gatsby Movie Guide, you can better justify showing the newest version. Jay-Z was the executive music producer and it’s fascinating to dig deeper into the music selections and the whole Harlem Renaissance and modern hip hop connections. 

Finally, it is my opinion that a little party never hurt nobody. If you want ideas for your Gatsby and Jazz Age party, check out this post: Decorating Ideas for Your Great Gatsby Classroom Party

Ok, that’s all from me Old Sports! Whether you are planning a Great Gatsby AP unit, ELL unit, or regular English 11 unit, I hope this post and The Great Gatsby Teaching Resources have given you lots of meaningful and fun activities for teaching The Great Gatsby!