Author: Khadija Ismael Suleiman (Kenya) | Published on 23 January 2026
Read what Khadija says about this activity
This activity helps make reading lessons active, enjoyable, and student-centered while strengthening comprehension, vocabulary, inference, prediction, and critical thinking. The activity also promotes collaboration and helps learners reflect on their own learning preferences.
Stage 1: Warm Up (Pre-teach)
Each learner should tell a partner about a place in the vicinity of your school which is dirty or polluted.
They should speculate how it got so dirty or polluted and what it used to look like before.
Stage 2: Reading
Write these comprehension questions on the board:
What problem affected the Mtoni River?
How did Amina and her team respond?
What did the phrase “Clean River, Healthy Lives” mean to them?
What was the outcome of their campaign?
Your situation will affect how you run the next activity. If you have access to a photocopier, you can make one copy of the reading text for each group and distribute them. If not, you could write the text on the board. If you don’t have enough space on the board, you could post the text on the wall and have one student from each group gather around the text and copy it down into their workbooks while the rest of the class are doing the previous activity.
Reading the Text
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The River Clean-Up The Mtoni River flowed quietly behind Mtoni Secondary School. Over the years, it had become choked with plastic waste and foul-smelling water. When the Environment Club members noticed the pollution, they decided to take-action. Led by Amina, the club chairperson, they launched a “Clean River, Healthy Lives” campaign. They began by mobilising the community, printing posters, and visiting nearby homes to create awareness about pollution. On the clean-up day, students, teachers, and even boda-boda1 riders joined in. Together they collected garbage, planted trees, and built dustbins along the riverbank. When the work was done, the river sparkled again. “It’s not just about cleaning,” Amina told the group. “It’s about changing how we treat our environment.” From that day, Mtoni River became a symbol of what unity and responsibility can achieve. |
Allow time for students to read the text and check their answer to the comprehension questions in groups. Elicit the answers.
Elicit the meanings of these words from the text
mobilising, awareness, choked, polluted, responsibility.
Assign one word to each group and ask them to write a sentence with that word. Elicit the sentences for the benefit of the class
Stage 3: Main Activity (Carousel Stations)
Set up 4 stations around the classroom, each focusing on a post-reading activity. Leave clear instructions at each table and tell the students they will work on the activity for five minutes before moving on to a different activity.
- Role-play: Act out a scene from the story.
- Plan: Think of the place you told your partner about at the beginning of the story. What could be done to clean up that place?
- Character Analysis: What kind of person is Amina? Can you give any evidence from the story?
- Creative Response: What if the result had not been so good? Can you re-write the last part of the story so that it ends badly?
Divide learners into groups.
Rotate groups every five minutes until all stations are visited by all groups.
Stage 4: Reflection & Sharing
Ask each learner to discuss with a partner which station they enjoyed most and how it connects to their learning style (visual, verbal, creative, analytical)
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Notes If the room or time makes movement difficult, keep groups at their tables and pass the station task cards around instead of students moving. |