Amber Arsenault

9th Grade English

1. Standards:

• Observable objective: Students will be able to summarize, discuss, and explain the novel 1984.
• Multicultural goal: Respect for human dignity and universal human rights.
• Observable objective: Students will be able to explain the dangers of having a totalitarian
government and why we have basic human rights.

• Learning Styles:

Auditory- Get into groups and discuss the parallels between the dystopian government in the
novel and our government today.

Visual- show the video 1984: How the Warnings of George Orwell's Novel Remain Relevant
Today | TIME

Kinesthetic- Give the students each newspaper articles and provide quotes from the novel and
have them link the quotes with news articles today.

• Gardner's Intelligence:

Interpersonal intelligence will be used within the small groups to find correlation in today’s
society and the society portrayed in 1984.

Linguistic intelligence will be used when reading the novel and while reading the newspaper
articles and quotes.

2. Materials:
Current newspapers
Video: 1984: How the Warnings of George Orwell's Novel Remain Relevant Today | TIME
The novel 1984

3. Instruction- learning Process:

• Do First: Take 5 minutes to discuss the concept of the novel that the students should have
completed reading. Explain a totalitarian government.
• Mini-lesson: Get into small groups (4-5) students each and have them discuss examples of how
George Orwell’s dystopian novel relates to their world today and list similarities that they find as
a group. Show the video.
• Guided Practice: Have a student from each group read a similarity that they found and briefly
discuss the accuracy of the statement and evaluate if they are grasping the concept.
• Independent Practice: Let each student pick a newspaper from the ones brought to class. Have
 quotes given visible on the board. Have the students read the articles within the paper and
correlate at least two quotes with two different articles. They can write the article title and quote
on a separate piece of paper. Have them explain next to the quote and article title why they relate
and why they chose that article.

• Exit Slip: As a class go through the given quotes and have students raise their hands when going
through the quotes individually if they chose to use that quote to get a perspective on the quotes
that were used the most.

4. Resources

Schulten, K. (2017, February 09). Teaching Orwell and '1984' With The New York Times. Retrieved July
26, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/learning/lesson-plans/teaching-orwell-and-1984-
with-the-new-york-times.html

T. (2017, April 06). 1984: How The Warnings Of George Orwell's Novel Remain Relevant Today |
TIME. Retrieved July 27, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RGxXV-UyAA

5. Reflection: The student will learn how to correlate ideas and concepts from classic novels into
their lives today and understand why reading these books helps them within the world today. The student
will be forced to look at how people are treated and basic human rights that we have as Americans and
how the government is structed. They will be able to understand why these rights are important and how
everyone’s freedom is significant. Within the instruction learning process students have time to discuss in
groups and get peer to peer ideas, there is also a video for the visual and auditory learners and being able
to physically have a newspaper in their hands and link quotes to the articles envelopes some kinesthetic
learning skills. I think the strengths on this lesson plan are relating classic novels to todays society and
allowing students to actively learn about past and present simultaneously. The weaknesses of the lesson
plan might be that there isn’t as much discussion as there could be and this could leave the student
confused whether they are doing the assignments given correctly. I think overall it is a strong lesson plan
if the students completed the novel and we have went through it as a class before doing this.