The Ericksen model for nematic liquid crystals couples a director field with a scalar degree of orientation variable and allows the formation of various defects with finite energy. We propose a simple but novel finite element approximation of the problem that can be implemented easily within standard finite element packages. Our scheme is projection-free and thus circumvents the use of weakly acute meshes, which are quite restrictive in three dimensions but are required by recent algorithms for convergence. We pro…