Creative Lesson Plan (Sec 2 Animal Farm)

This lesson focused on Chapter 4 of Animal Farm, where Snowball and Boxer show their bravery in the Battle of Cowshed, for which they are given the awards of Animal Hero, First Class. The main thing I wanted the boys to focus on for this chapter was the characterisation of Boxer and Snowball. I started the lesson with a short stop-motion animation clip of the battle itself, and asked the boys what they noticed, who the main heroes of the fight were and what they did. After this we went through a short summary of the chapter, after which I moved on to the main activity. The students had to create a poster for the award of Animal Hero, First Class, for either Boxer or Snowball (I created a sample poster for the dead sheep's award, Animal Hero, Second Class, for the students to look at). On the poster, they had to state the award itself, provide a list of the character's contributions to the battle, a list of the character's exemplary traits, as well as some quotable quotes. This forced the boys to open their books and actually read them, something they don't usually do. For the visuals on their posters, I printed out different pictures of Snowball and Boxer, and brought glue and markers for the boys to use.Some of the boys got really creative, incorporating the rhetorical language that the pigs use, and making up quotes from people like Alfred Lord Tennyson, praising Snowball and his tactical genius. After the posters were completed, I put them all up on the board and let the boys do a gallery walk. In the end, I marked these against a poster rubric that I found online.

Ideally, I would have liked to carry this lesson out in the computer lab and let the boys create posters on Glogster. However, I have been advised against bringing these boys to the computer lab as the environment (the internet) usually proves too distracting for them, and they become difficult to monitor and will not stay on task. Nevertheless, I think the boys quite enjoyed the activity, and they definitely learned from it, the posters were really well done.