How To Teach Animal Farm How To Teach Animal Farm Establishing context • Animal Farm and The Communist Revolution Orwell’s intention in writing Animal Farm was to present a critique of communism as it was practised in 1930s and 40s USSR. To understand the book, then, students will need to have some basic knowledge about the rise of communism in Russia in the first half of the 20th century. A good, basic and short introduction can be given to students with this 20 minute documentary from the show Timeline: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=2VldXUyCaeQ. The above documentary should be watched with students before they read through the book. As students read through Animal Farm, they can then fill out the attached ‘Communism and Animal Farm Parallels’. When students use this resource it’s important to note: The order in which events happened historically in Russia aren’t necessarily the order in which Orwell writes about them in Animal Farm. Students can use this resource as a bookmark. By cutting up the different events from the timeline, they can insert these into the sections of Animal Farm which they believe best correspond with the historical event. As an initial activity, after reading through the book, students can combine elements from each of these columns below to create statements about the text: Animal Farm is a... Satire Parody Critique Metaphor Allegory A Ticking Mind Resource which... Satires Parodies Critiques Parallels Represents Orwell What Orwell believes Orwell’s belief Orwell’s view Orwell’s perception what Orwell sees the hypocrisy of.... the oppression of... the deeply flawed.. that the USSR is... 2 Exploring Characters • Metaphorical and satirical characters To understand characterisation in Animal Farm, students first need to think about the purpose of satire and metaphor. To do this, we can start with an easy example. Students should look through the resource ‘Pig Descriptions and Actions In Animal Farm’ and divide these into two groups: Descriptions and actions which are funny/ridiculous and descriptions and actions which are serious. Explain to students that all of these actions and descriptions are metaphors, because a metaphor is where you say one thing is another thing. For example, corrupt leaders are greedy pigs. However, some of the pig actions and descriptions are satirical because they make things look funny or stupid. Ask students to look at the descriptions and actions of pigs. Which thing is particularly ridiculous? Why? We can then move on to explain to students that one basic point Orwell is making is that human behaviour can be stupid and ridiculous. To show this, each animal in Animal Farm metaphorically represents a “type” of person or group. For instance, Napoleon is a pig who represents leaders with lots of power. He is shown to be ridiculous because he is so greedy and so obviously corrupt. Students can think about what “type” of person each of the other characters/animals in the book represents by creating a table such as this one: Animal/Character Pig/Napoleon What “type” or person do they represent? How does this animal behave that is ridiculous? Leader Napoleon as leader is incredibly selfish and greedy like a pig. He is ridiculous because he is so obviously corrupt and hypocritical. Students can use two attached resources to help them think about what each of the characters in the novel represents: ‘Animal Farm Characters’ and ‘Animal Farm Character Types and Actions’. A Ticking Mind Resource 3
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