Things Fall Apart
Day 2 : Things fall apart Story guide Lesson Title: Things Fall Apart Story Guide
Date: 4/2/14
Overview: This day will be devoted to gaining a basic understanding of the text and how the students
may use the guide to aid them in their understanding of it.
Goal: To give my students a better understanding of the text through other texts and materials related
to the text.
Objectives:
After this lesson my students…
● will have a better understanding of the text
● will know how to use the resources available to them in the guide
Standards Achieved:
● 1.1.10.A: Apply appropriate strategies to analyze, interpret, and evaluate author’s technique(s)
in terms of both substance and style as related to supporting the intended purpose using grade
level text.
● 1.1.10.B: Use context clues, knowledge of root words, and word origins as well as reference
sources to decode and understand new words.
● 1.1.10.C: Interpret the literal and figurative meanings of words to distinguish between what
words mean literally and what they imply as well as word origins to understand both familiar and
unfamiliar vocabulary.
● 1.1.10.D: Demonstrate comprehension / understanding before reading, during reading, and
after reading on a variety of literary works through strategies such as comparing and contrasting
text elements, assessing validity of text based upon content, and evaluating author’s strategies.
● 1.3.10.A: Identify the differing characteristics that distinguish the literary fiction and non-fiction
forms of narrative, poetry, drama, and essay and determine how the form relates to meaning. Materials/Resources/Setup:
Pre-Made:
● Story Guide
■ https://docs.google.com/a/scasd.org/document/d/1nUTUFJ8C0Y7rjPQu39e8d
6dTyst_mTqGnkJPzQjmOsw/edit
To Hand Out:
● Story Guide
Set-Up
● None
Prior Knowledge Assessment Questions:
Things Fall Apart
Day 2 : Things fall apart Story guide ●
●
●
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What do my students know about Chinua Achebe?
What are my student’s feelings about “study guides”?
Will my students find this guide useful?
Can I teach my students to use this guide effectively?
Guiding/Essential Questions:
● How does our understanding of the world affect the way we read and view text outside
of that cultural perspective?
● How do we understand others at deeper levels?
● Why are traditions important?
● Is it possible to have empathy for others who have an experience outside of your own?
Activities:
1. Handout Story Guides
2. Go over each different part of the guide and ask students to fill out WISC
3. Begin poem Analysis
a. Have students read and annotate poem
i.
Encourage students to use phones to find definitions and information
b. Then do a round robin reading so that each student reads one line of the poem
c. Begin questions and annotation discussion
d. NOTES:
"The Second Coming" William Butler Yeats: (1921)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre (1)
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming (2) is at hand;
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi (3)
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
Things Fall Apart
Day 2 : Things fall apart Story guide A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries (4)
of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
(1) Spiral, making the figure of a cone.
(2) Second Coming refers to the promised return of Christ on Doomsday, the end of the world; but in Revelation
13 Doomsday is also marked by the appearance of a monstrous beast.
(3) Spirit of the World.
(4) 2,000 years; the creature has been held back since the birth of Christ. Yeats imagines that the great heritage
of Western European civilization is collapsing, and that the world will be swept by a tide of savagery from the
"uncivilized" portions of the globe. As you read this novel, try to understand how Achebe's work is in part an
answer to this poem.
One important theme in Things Fall Apart is the irreconcilable difference between Christianity's focus on
individual salvation and the tribal vision of the group's salvation being dependent on the actions of individuals
that Achebe portrays within his novel. You might point out this cultural and religious difference as you discuss
the "The Second Coming," and its allusion to the Bible and Christian thought, in relation to way that Achebe
applies the poem's line "things fall apart" within the novel. In the class' subsequent analysis of the text, you can
ask students to pursue the grave implications of these incompatible views for Igbo society as Umuofia's citizens
confront the British missionaries and their accompanying colonial government.
4. Allow students to begin reading for the rest of the period
Homework:
● Read Chapters 1-4 for Friday
Assessment:
● Discussion
● WISC’s filled out in the guide
Reflection:
● Reference Material:
○ http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/yeats/section5.rhtml
○ http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/chinua-achebes-things-fall-apart-teaching-throu
gh-novel