A Creative Lesson Plan doing Animal Farm

There were two versions of this lesson plan that I did with my students at Manjusri Secondary and I will be elaborating on both. Basically, the main purpose of the lesson was to get students to pick out the events in the text that shows how the 7 Commandments in Animal Farm were broken.

For my first class, the students were broken off into their respective literature groups. The leaders would then come up to the front and pick out a commandment from a box, making sure not to let the other groups know what commandment they picked out. The leaders were then told to go back to their groups and tell them what commandment they got and discuss an event in the text that shows it being broken. They then had to act it out in front of the class while the other groups tried to guess what commandment was being broken and the event in the text that shows it. Point would be awarded to the groups that guessed and acted out the scene successfully. Most of the students seemed to enjoy this lesson. The only downside was that since there were so many groups, the lesson had to drag on after school but this wasn't a problem as it was their last period already and (surprisingly) they didn't seem to mind finishing it up.

For my second class, seeing how there wouldn't be enough time based on my previous experience with my first class, I decided to ask the students to draw it out instead. I got miniature whiteboards for this and gave it out to each group. The problem was that instead of drawing out the event, many of the groups simply drew out the commandment they got in picture form. In terms of engagement, many of the students also seemed a lot less engaged as compared to the previous class. Guess I should have just stuck with the acting but as mentioned, I was afraid there wouldn't be enough time and in their case, I couldn't drag on as it wasn't their last period.