A Creative Lesson Plan for Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

One creative lesson plan that I conducted successfully involved using role-play to get students more physically and emotionally involved in an introductory lesson about the history of racial discrimination in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. It was a 60 minute lesson, and I started off the first half giving the students a very brief summary of the what happened in the years leading up to  the novel itself, which was set in Mississippi of the 1930s. I prepared a short Powerpoint Presentation and used a lot of pictures to explain the early years of slavery and the American Civil War. Then I spent a little more time setting the scene of the novel itself, outlining 3 main issues of the times: The Great Depression, Jim Crow Laws, and the prevalence of lynching.  Rather than pilling them with a mountain of facts, I was trying to get them to understand and empathise with the plight faced by African Americans during that time.

In the second half, I instructed the students to push their tables and chairs to side, and form a large circle of chairs in the middle of the classroom. They were quite familiar with this practice, so it was carried out fairly quickly. Before the lesson, I had scripted 3 scenarios about racial discrimination, selecting bits from pre-existing texts such as Angelica Gibbs’ short story, “The Test,” a scene from Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and a final one from the movie, “The Colour Purple.” The 3 scenarios also involved an increasingly large number of students and an increasing amount of action. Only the selected students were given the scripts, while the rest of the class was assigned to predict what would happen, based on the character profiles provided for each scenario. I then gave the selected students 1-2 min to prepare themselves and run through the lines with their fellow actors. Although the students started off quite shy and embarrassed, they gradually got into the flow of things, and the 3^rd scenario was done quite well I think, given the limited time they had to prepare.

Finally, I showed them the original clip from “The Colour Purple,” which the 3^rd scenario was based on, so they could examine the differences between their interpretation and Hollywood’s version of that same scene.